Who here works on Subversion?

[Michael ODonnell]

> But if I'm understanding correctly, at the point where you've
> completed that first merge, your dev branch and your main branch
> would be identical, right?


The intent of merging changes from a branch back into the
mainline is to inflict the same changes onto the mainline as
you've inflicted on the branch - it doesn't necessarily make
the two identical if the mainline has changed in the meantime
(as a result of, say, merges from other branches...)