I tried, I really did, to resolve the trunk and release branches of my libraries for the upcoming release. But the truth is that I'm finding Boost's current interdependent structure and the sluggishness of SVN on a project of our size just makes everything too hard to do.
Maybe, you could describe your SVN workflow? While SVN certainly could be a bit faster, I find that since server upgrade to 1.6 and first merge with 1.6, subsequent merges take less time that I need to deal with a cup of tea. And it's once per release cycle.
Hmmm, I'm still finding merges very slow for large trees - Boost.Math takes a good hour or more to merge for example - I would expect Boost.Python to be the same. That said, I only merge when I've accumulated enough changes to make a "release" for that library worthwhile, and it's not like I have to hold it's hand or anything while the merge is going on. So it's basically 5 minutes and then get on with something else, then when the merge is complete I visually inspect the diff and run the tests on the release branch - again the latter can take quite a while, but again it's just a case of fire off the command and then leave it to it. So the amount of my time spent on merging is very minimal, provided of course you're not in a hurry and don't desperately need the machine cycles for something else. This also assuming you're doing a "bring the release branch into synch with Trunk" kind of merge - I haven't tried merging specific patches or revisions - I assume that would take rather more figuring out. John.