I am trying to keep a feature branch up to date by merging trunk into the branch. Problem is, that about 2000 files that was there when the branch was created, and that has been left untouched on both the branch and on trunk is getting updated with nothing but svn:mergeinfo. The project is rather large in scale, and the impact on our SVN history is so big, that it renders the merge commit history unusable as it is marking literally thousands of files changed, even though the only change to these files, is done by SVN itself.
I have tried
I should mention, that I've been looking closely at the SVN documentation when trying this. So no rules should be broken ( eg. no switched subtrees, clean local copy etc.)
Bascially to clean up the repository you need to run the following on your integration branch so that the change fans out from there:-
C:> svn propdel svn:mergeinfo –R
i.e. you do it in the trunk so that future release and feature branches are not polluted. When merging existing branches you can ignore all svn:merginfo changes below the "merge root" as they will be inherited anyway.
I wrote a blog on this issue a while back which covers it in more detail:-
Cleaning up svn:mergeinfo Droppings http://chrisoldwood.blogspot.com/2010/03/cleaning-up-svnmergeinfo-droppings.html