title: svn merge functionality broken by tree conflicts
body: <p>I don't know when the svn team decided to inflict tree conflicts on us but it has completely broken the merge functionality of svn.</p>
  
  <p>I have a branch and I want to merge the latest changes from the trunk into the branch.  I've already done one such merge, but this one fails because of a tree conflict.  Here's the command:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ svn --force merge -r 3185:3192 svn://chamar2/rx-services/SAMS .
  svn: Attempt to add tree conflict that already exists
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The first time I tried this merge (without the <code>--force</code>) it only created the tree conflict and did not merge anything.  Now it just reports the message above.</p>
  
  <p>If I do <code>svn status</code> on the branch working copy it shows all the files that have changes that have not been merged back to the trunk yet.  Of course, the purpose of my branch is to do these changes where they are not yet in the trunk.</p>
  
  <p>What were they thinking when they did this?</p>
  
  <p>I haven't found any usable information on what causes tree conflicts and how I can continue to work now that svn has created these things.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to tell svn to forget about tree conflicts and just do the merge like it used to?</p>
  
  <p>I'm using a 1.6 client and an older svn server (probably 1.3.1).</p>