svn - Subversion branch reintegration

Question

When a branch is reintegrated to the trunk, is that branch effectively dead?

Can you make modifications to the branch after the reintegration and merge those back into the trunk at a later date?

Answer 1

You can do it technically, you branch is not dead nor disabled, but it is not recommended to merge from branch to trunk after reintegration.

You can find a full discussion about the reason for that, here: Subversion merge reintegrate

Basically, it says, that it is possible to merge your changes again to the trunk, but since reintegration forces you to merge from trunk to branch prior to the reintegrate operation you'll be facing Reflective/Cyclic Merge which is very problematic in Subversion 1.5.
According to the article, it is recommended to delete your reintegrated branch immediately after reintegration and create a new one with the same (or different) name instead.

This is a known Subversion behavior which will be addressed in future version (probably in 1.6)

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