Submitting this to trunk was no trouble at all, all things went as normal. However, when merging from trunk to other branches, I kept running into problems. All files that received the new license were showing as conflicts, even though there were no other changes. I had to manually copy the license from the old file to merged file. NOT fun. I did this manually when I was merging to the report-api-refactoring branch because it was late and I didn’t want to look up the “right” way to fix it.

Well, I think I found the reason.  Java file handlers don’t do prepending very well.  The script that Saptarshi wrote creates a new file with the license code, and then appends the old file contents.  The java newLine() method used in the java script to append that old file contents apparently uses a different newline character than the default for unix/windows.

This minor little difference caused two problems: 1) merging produced conflicts and 2) when comparing versions or showing annotations it showed that I had changed all lines when in fact I had just added the license header.

The fix for problem 1 above was to merge from trunk with the ignore-eol-style flag set:

svn merge -x––ignore-eol-style -r3684:3685 http://svn.openmrs.org/openmrs/trunk /home/ben/workspace/openmrs-api-refactoring

Note: I merged from trunk up to version 3684 first using the Subclipse svn gui (3685 was the revision with the license patch).  I ran the above at the command line to get a nice clean successful merge.  I was then able to merge from 3685 to HEAD using subclipse again.

I can’t really tell if this fixed problem 2 as well because I can’t remember which files this was happening to before.  The few files I queried were only showing me as having changed the first few license lines, so it appears to have solved it.