What is the base file in tortoise svn?

Question

I'm having problems merging code into UAT environment, I get a lot of merge conflicts. I've been trying to resolve them and try to understand tortoise svn more. I read in their documentation,

"The base file represents the oldest version of a file, from where You and They start making changes. Mine represents the base file with all the changes you made, and Theirs is the file with all the changes someone else made to the file. The left pane shows the changes in Theirs relative to the base file and the right pane shows the changes in Mine relative to the base file."

I dont understand what the base file is. If I understand it correctly, "Theirs" is the code in the repository, "Mine" is the code that I'm merging into UAT, so is the base file the version of the file that was merged before the one I'm currently trying to merge?

Thanks :)

Answer 1

Base file is newest (AFAICR) version of file, from which "Your" (local in WC) and "Theirs" (remote, in some server place) histories are diverged.

Newest (in my English and understanding of DAGs) because "diverged histories" can be merged into something common more than once during lifetime of histories and if merge happened before now, successfully merged histories are excluded from calculating common ancestor... but my impressions may be wrong

Anyway, Revision Graph for pet-project with one file can give you rather good visualisation of this concept (for single-file repo "revision" == "change in file in question", while this statement is not technically correct for multi-file repo)