title: Integrating non-ancestor branch into trunk
body: <p>When SVN was set up, instead of creating a branch from trunk, we simply created a new folder in the root structure:</p>
  
  <pre><code>/branches/dev/  
  /trunk
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and worked on that. Now, of course, it's impossible to merge dev into trunk as SVN doesn't see a hierarchical connection. I'm trying to find the best way to make it proper, so that the dev branch we have our code in is related to trunk and we can do normal merges in the future. </p>
  
  <p>I found two approaches - one of them simply copy code from dev to trunk, commit trunk, and then do a proper branch checkout. My problem with this approach is that we'd lose all the revision history, as the real dev branch would start out fresh.</p>
  
  <p>Other approach is to use --ignore-hierarchy. This seems like forcing stuff into trunk and I'm unsure of the downsides of this approach.</p>
  
  <p>Basically what's the best way to fix the screw-up from the beginning, when we physically created dev folder on our own, instead of branching trunk?</p>