The article demonstrated a silent bug in a specific use case: merging a rename for a file which was modified locally. I was responding to the generalization "d

The article demonstrated a silent bug in a specific use case: merging a rename for a file which was modified locally. I was responding to the generalization "don't rename files if you use branches at all". Things are not that bad. As I explained above, merging a change to a file which was renamed locally works fine: it triggers a tree conflict which is easy to resolve. svnmerge.py was deprecated by the introduction of merge tracking in subversion 1.5, so I'm not sure why you are still dealing with that. You can migrate with svnmerge-migrate-history.py