Need help / tips on using branches and merging back into the trunk

My question is, when merging in accordance with the procedure below, the last step of the procedure “folding branches back into the trunk” is the right way to do this in a best practice scenario?

I have been using svn for many years. In my personal projects, I always happily run along the trunk without second thoughts, and version control in a single-linear linear mode has long been close to perfection. Simple and efficient. Everything was bliss, until the day when I wanted to have more control over third-party libraries.

Today I am in a project that I feel has outgrown an approach based on hacking with a direct move. I have multiple third-party libraries, some of which change weekly, and I really need more control over what happens. I need the ability to view specific changesets between a version of a third-party lib version and track changes that I made for specific libraries. I saw several times when the code base was very confused and it was difficult to return to working condition with an inexperienced builder, I can not afford to make mistakes more often here.

So, I looked at the fork of the vendor, read several articles here and there. I have a great book, Version Control with Subversion, but the examples I see sometimes contradict each other in their approach, and I would like to have a sense of branching. I was going to follow the approach given in this post by Evan Weaver .

I outlined the procedure below, my concern is in the last section, “Folding a branch into the trunk”. It seems that the buildmasters I worked with in the past usually “merged” the change branches on the trunk, and I don't think the branches are even deleted. Is this the right approach?

Create a branch

1 - Pay attention to the current version of the chapter:

    svn info svn://server.com/svn/repository/trunk | grep Revision

2 - . -. your_branch, HEAD_REVISION , 1..

svn cp svn://server.com/svn/repository/trunk \
svn://server.com/svn/repository/branches/your_branch \
-m "Branching from trunk to your_branch at HEAD_REVISION"

3 - , ( ):

 svn switch --relocate \
 svn://server.com/svn/repository/trunk \
 svn://server.com/svn/repository/branches/your_branch

4 - , _branch, ok:

svn info | grep URL
svn up

5 - .

_branch, , your_branch.

1 - - .

2. Subversion, , ( , ). :

svn log --limit 500 | grep -B 3 your_branch

3 - :

svn info svn://server.com/svn/repository/trunk | grep Revision

4 - your_branch, LAST_MERGED_REVISION , 2 HEAD_REVISION, , 3:

  svn merge -r LAST_MERGED_REVISION:HEAD_REVISION \
  svn://server.com/svn/repository/trunk .

5.a - . ? , ? , . , svn revert -R

5.b - 5.a , , :

svn status | egrep '^C|^.C'

6 - , COMMAND 4.:

svn ci -m "Merged changes from trunk to your_branch: COMMAND"       

, . .

1 - ( " " ), your_branch .

2 - :

svn del svn://server.com/svn/repository/trunk

3 - your_branch :

svn mv svn://server.com/svn/repository/branches/your_branch \
svn://server.com/svn/repository/trunk

4 - :

svn switch --relocate \
svn://server.com/svn/repository/branches/your_branch \
svn://server.com/svn/repository/trunk 

!

, , .