SVN Merging and change histories

I have been a big fan of version control (SVN in particular) for a number of years now, but I must admit I have never really bothered with branching. The reason for this is probably because the applications I have been working on have generally always been started from scratch so everyone has worked in the trunk.

Where i’m working now we have decided that all maintenance and enhancements that come in must be worked on in a branch. We have some quite mature applications here, and branching for new releases has been working well.

Now today came the time for me to merge a branch back into the trunk. I’m using subclipse at the moment, so switched my working copy back to the trunk (where you want to merge the changes into) and went ahead to merge in the changes from my branch. I selected the branch as the from URL, selected the revision range that I wanted to merge and fired it all off.

SVN worked it’s magic and merged the files from my branch into my working copy (trunk). Out of curiousity I opened up one of the files that had come across and checked out the SVN History. Unfortunately the history of changes that I made while working in the branch were no where to be found :(. I jumped on the web and wasn’t really able to find a difinitive answer as to if they do come across or not.

Does anyone know if it is possible to get the history to come across as part of a merge?