Merging branches into working copy?

I am using Subversion to manage code for a web app. There are shared dev/QA servers and each one is a working copy of the trunk of the project.

In order to 开发者_如何学运维push changes to these shared sites I am merging from branches (each of which is up to date with trunk) into the working copies.

Many times I get conflicts on files that are not modified in the source branch. Also I'm getting tree conflicts on items added to the trunk but not added to the branch... why isn't it just skipping that?

I'm aware that merging to working copies is probably not a good idea but the shared environments thing is a requirement.

What am I doing wrong?

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I have since been using an environment branch in addition to release branches.