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.
Related
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.
We have a branch called "Main". In July 2012 I created a new branch from this called "Phase 3" for the next version of our project. We have been working on this since then, but from time to time some other changes get applied to Main.
In May this year we performed a merge from Main to Phase 3 with some of those changes, and that was all fine.
Between then and now, we upgraded our TFS server from 2008 to 2012 update 3. (I wasn't involved with the "upgrade" but I believe it was an install on a new server with some kind of backup/restore of the data.) We've bit had any other issues with this.
Last week I tried to perform another merge from Main to Phase 3. I chose "selected changesets" because we have done a serious amount of rework in our phase 3 branch so merging changes across is quite difficult - so I wanted to do them bit by bit.
However, I was surprised to see that Visual Studio was trying to merge across changes from July 2011 - a good year before the branch was made (the very first changes made to this part of our project in fact.)
Oddly enough, if I view the history of the phase 3 solution I can expand it and see all these changes. So TFS appears to know that they have already applied.
I tried to merge some of the earlier changes across to see what would happened. The only changes it included were to do with items that had been renamed or deleted. For example, we had renamed our solution so TFS wanted to branch and merge a copy of the SLN with the old name. Or we had some images that had been subsequently deleted in both branches, but not at the time of this new merge.
So I backed this out and tried to merge everything across from May this year - i.e. just before our last merge across. This carried over a hideous number of changes - all sorts of things including regular merge/edit type changes. So I backed that out too!
We had created another branch from Phase 3. I have been able to merge between the two branches OK. I think it was created about a week before the TFS upgrade. But it's not experiencing the issue.
We have other branches that were taken from Main. These are experiencing the issue in that TFS is wanting to apply changes that it has already made.
I am using VS2012 update 3 to do the merge. I also tried VS2010 just in case but that does the same. Also a colleague has tried it and confirmed the same symptoms.
I don't think it helps that our phase 3 is so vastly different to main that merging anything across is really difficult.
Does anyone know how I can best resolve this? I'm a little worried about doing something I might regret later on!
I encountered similar problems when upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010. The issue is probably due to partially merged changesets. I.e. some of the files in the changeset have been merged, some haven't. Or it could be a branch move / rename situation. See the answer here for details of why a branch rename can cause this problem
In TFS 2008 if you attempted a merge, then unchecked files from the pending changes list. TFS assumed that you didn't want to merge the file ever again and on subsequent merges you wouldn't see those files.
In TFS 2010 or higher, the behaviour changes. If you uncheck files from the pending changes, on the next merge TFS will attempt to merge those files again. I think TFS 201x has the correct behaviour but its a pain that MS didn't highlight the change in behavior.
To check if this is the case, run the following from the command line
tf merge $/tp/main $/tp/phase3 /recursive /candidate
The /candidate switch tells TFS to give you a list of changesets it wants to merge without performing the merge. If you see any changesets in the list that have a * next to them, these are partially merged.
To fix it you have 2 choices.
Merge the files and resolve the conflicts, it might be worth merging on a changeset by changeset basis rather than trying to do them all at once. This will probably be a bit painful but once it's done it's done.
If you're confident that the phase 3 branch is correct then you can Merge using the command prompt. If you use tf merge $/tp/main $/tp/phase3 /version:c123~c456 /recursive /discard where c123 represents the oldest changeset you want to ignore and c456 represents the most recent changeset you want to ignore. The /discard switch tells TFS to update the merge history so that it thinks the merge has been done, but it won't actually perform the merge. This should remove the partially merged changesets from your list of candidates
If you opt for option 2 then you should do some analysis to make sure that you really don't want to take the partially merged changesets.
If you get to the point where merging is too difficult, or you just don't trust it.. then the only practical option is the "stomp over it with a new changeset". ie - do the merge manually outside of TFS and then commit your new, fixed changeset. then, kill the old branch and start again.
Not an ideal situation to be in, but your source integrity is paramount. Hopefully starting from a fresh branch will prevent issues like this in the future.
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.
We are using TFS Continuous Development model
Main Trunk
-> Various Development branches
-> Various Release branches
All merging back to main trunk
Now we need some major changes to our folder structure and solutions
How do you handle folder restructure in above model of TFS usage?
do i need to draw line and create new structure from latest Main trunk and lock all branches and do updates then creates branches with restructured new trunk.
Or am i underestimating TFS, would be able to handle major folder structure updates and propagate over to branches. As long as i know if we move around folders in branch or trunk it don't like it.
TFS can handle this, and does it by "renaming" each file by changing it's TFS location path.
I've been able to do this in a child branch, merging it up into the trunk, and then back into another branch.
It does get a little tricky, and you are sometimes presented with confusing dialog boxes because it can't automatically resolve renaming changes.
When I got this box, I resolved any actual content changes in files. I was then able to cancel out of manually resolving every renaming change without any problems, and everything worked perfectly.