Following the instructions for “shelving” work in progress using Subversion, I tried to merge my work back onto the trunk, but kept getting the following “error” messages:

“Skipped ‘path/to/file/on/shelf/but/not/in/trunk’”

I read and re-read the Subversion documentation for merging and it made it sound like I was doing something wrong. I finally found a posting with instructions on how to merge in spite of the “Skipped” error message… so I tried it, and it worked (in spite of the misleading messages). The trick really is to ignore the messages.

Note that following the merge, files that are in the source branch and not in the destination branch need to be svn added before they will end up in the destination.

I sincerely hope this post helps others save the two or three hours I lost trying to figure out what I was doing wrong!