I've got a branch from trunk in TFS on which development is complete. I understand that merging back into trunk should be the next step, but due to a situation beyond my control, I am not able to do that. I'm satisfied the branch represents my complete application. Is there a merge option that will simply take the branch as the trunk?
As I read the MS documentation on MERGE, the baseless merge comes close to what I want. But, I understand that the trunk files would still be part of the result, which I do not want.
A branch has a name and a purpose. You could of course rename the branch, or change its purpose. You could also label your current branch... Or create a new branch from your current development branch.
Whether that's a good idea, that's something else.
Related
Do you really need a Branch to CheckIn / CheckOut Code in TFS i.e, just add files to a folder ?
What would be advantage to Branch in that case ?
You do not need a branch to check in and check out.
Branches however provide you with the ability to make changes to more thank one version of your code at once. Lets say that you have one folder at $/ProjectA/MyAwesomeApplication/Master. You can happily work away, checking in and releasing. At some point you find a bug in production that needs fixed immediately. However MASTER is well beyond what was last released and you don't want to deploy those changes yet.
You know which build is deployed and thus which changeset. You can branch MASTER at that changeset (the past) and create $/ProjectA/MyApplication/QuickFix. There you can fix that bug and ship, then merge back into MASTER and delete that branch.
Now obviously this is expensive and time consuming. A better way would to move forward and just ship what is in MASTER. If you have feature flags and good testing them you should be able to do that. There are however always those exceptions to that rule, and that's where branching comes in.
If you are using Git in TFS rather than TFVC the story is different.
I have the Development branch forked from the Main branch.
Could I merge the Development branch back to the Main so that Main branch code would be equal the Development branch?
What is the most safe and reliable solution for this?
The easiest way I've found to do this is to do a merge using Visual Studio and the Source Control Explorer.
In the Source Control Explorer, right-click on your development branch and select Branching and Merging > Merge
In the Target Branch drop-down select your trunk ("Main") as the destination. This is likely the default selection if you've branched from Main originally.
There are two options:
All changes up to a specific versions: You choose based on a revision and merge it all up to that revision in one fell swoop. If you have a lot of changes, this can save you some time, but also is riskier in terms of resolving conflicts if there have been a lot of changes in Main.
Selected changesets: You select single or groups of changesets to merge back and then repeat this process until you've merged back what you need. Less risky option, but much more time consuming. I personally prefer this approach so that I can see the changes going back into the trunk and know what to expect as changes.
TFS will instruct you if there are merge conflicts while you are merging. This occurs when you change something in the trunk after you've branched to your development. If one of the changes you've made in development conflict with the changes you've made in the trunk, you will have the chance to resolve this in Visual Studio.
If you do not have any conflicts, your development changes will move into the Trunk and simply merge with the changes you already have there.
I admit one work place they merged the Trunk to the Branches, but its not supposed to work that way.
The generally accepted method is merge the Branch back into the Trunk.
It sounds like you are working in the Trunk ("I can create some additional folder or additional files in the trunk") and wanting to merge into the Branch.
I recommend doing it the standard way: only work in Branches merging back to the Trunk, never coding directly in the Trunk.
Here is my current setup. (TFS2008)
I have a TRUNK with latest.
I have BRANCH-A off of TRUNK with only the production ready code merged in.
I would like to create a new BRANCH-B off of TRUNK but I don't want all the latest code, I only want what is currently in BRANCH-A.
After this is done I will be merging into both BRANCH-A and BRANCH-B from the TRUNK (so I don't want to branch BRANCH-B off of BRANCH-A.)
Thanks.
You need to perform a baseless merge. This sibling situation that you want to achieve is exactly what is described in How To: Perform a Baseless Merge in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server:
The process of merging items that are not directly branched from each
other is called a baseless merge. For example, you might want to merge
a change between two release branches, which are siblings of each
other, without merging up to the parent branch. You can only perform a
baseless merge by using the Tf merge command. You cannot perform a
baseless merge from within the Visual Studio IDE.
When you perform a baseless merge, TFS does not have any information
about the relationship of the files in the branches. For example, if
you have renamed a file, this will be viewed as a deleted file and a
new file will be added in the branch. For this reason you have to
perform more manual conflict resolutions than when you perform a
normal merge. However, you only have to perform this conflict
resolution once. After you have performed the baseless merge, TFS
records merge history and establishes a relationship between the
folders and files.
When you create BRANCH-B, you can either choose latest or a specific date/changeset/label. Take a look when you created BRANCH-A and create the BRANCH-B from the same date/changeset/label. As long as you haven't made any changes to BRANCH-A, you can create B to match.
Also, if you haven't already, take a look at the TFS 2008 Branching guidance. There is some great information and uses a pragmatic approach.
For TRUNK
On Create Branch you have option as a "Branch from Version" - by default By Latest Version is selected.
Select By changeSet or By Date
I performed the following actions in TFS:
Accidentally made some changes to a bunch of files in the trunk
Realized it.
merged the changes to the intended branch
rolled back the changes in the trunk (using tfpt rollback)
later, during the regularly scheduled forward integration from the trunk, I undid the changes in the branch.
How can I reapply the changes? There are three changesets and about 80 files in question.
A couple ways to do this, but probably the quickest here would be:
Check out the affected files (for edit) in the branch.
Get Specific Version from trunk for those files.
Copy those files to the appropriate branch directory.
Check in.
You could also consider rolling back the rollback changeset in the trunk and redoing what you did (minus the undo).
What I ended up doing was a forced merge:
tf merge /r /force $/source/trunk $/source/branch1 /v:C123~125
I will watch this set of changes carefully when we reverse integrate back into the trunk.
I also tried a tricksy workflow of using tfpt to rollback, shelve, and unshelve /migrate. Unfortunately the conflict resolution dialogue in tfpt unshelve is a bit lacking - missing things like default buttons and stuff, so I had to mouse-click half a dozen times or so per file. So I decided after a few files to try something else first.
Suppose I create an experimental branch in TFS. Now, I am finished with the branch, and I want to keep it around, but it has diverged sufficiently from the source branch that I want to make sure that no one can merge it back on accident. Is there a command in TFS to sever a branch, so that there is no merge path back?
I'm not sure if this will prevent a merge but in TFS 2010 you can turn a branch in to a folder
Check out Buck Hodges blog on the subject
As far as I know, you can set permissions on a branch.