We had a ten developers who do commits in the dev branch. After a week once all the tasks are through, i need to merge all the commits to test branch for rebasing before i tag and merge the releases to trunk. While merging a range of revisions i am getting strucked and time consuming to resolve with svn conflicts. When i get conflict : I used to do the following :
I allways consider the latet revision file for eg: .r500 is the latest revision which i need, and removing the extension it generate like filename.java.rev500, and deleting the remaining like mine,base file and previsous revision files which it genrates when the conflicts occur. Is this a best practise and advisable.I allways use diff in the log and check the latest version file manually while considering a revision when i get the conflict.
While merging most of the conflicted, updated files i am getting these symbols, <<<<<<< .working and >>>>>>> .merge-right.r500. Do we need to manually remove this in the files, when we perform releases. Even some times these symbols effect my build, resolving after i manually remove them.
Is it advisable to merge 15 to 20 revisions at a time, for eg: consisting 70 files in the entire release, is it better to merge 4 to 5 revisions solve the conflicts and move forward with remaning revisions, but if i merge few revisions and again after with remaining revisions its conumes a lot of time. When ever i do merge, i should allways manually edit, or any best methods and practises i need to follow.