I have a feeling this is a very stupid question, but I can't find the answer anywhere.
So we have a Dev branch and a QA branch. I merge a bunch of contiguous changesets from Dev into QA, and resolve conflicts. Now I want to merge in a later changeset, over the changes I just merged (not having checked in the changes from the first merge). No dice, says TFS:
The item $/My/Path/to/the/file.vb has an incompatible pending change.
What's its problem? Why won't it give me a merge conflict option to merge the new changeset to the files with the pending changes? I don't want to check in the first merge just so I can merge in another changeset.
TFS doesn't allow you to merge multiple non-contiguous changesets if the same file is changed in both of them. Your best option is to checkin the first set of changes, then do the merge.
I had the same problem. I did undo all the pending local changes and un-shelved the pending changes. It fixed my problems.
I was experiencing this same issue for a different reason and since I stumbled here for help I will give my solution.
I had a branch (branched_from_main) that was branched from main. I made changes to branched_from_main and checked them into the tfs repo. Then when I tried to merge branched_from_main back to main I was experiencing this issue. After looking into it for a while I realized that I had opened the main solution and built it. This meant that the solution now pulled down all of the nuget packages. Thus my main branch was considering the packages as pending changes.
So to fix the issue I had to reopen the main solution and undo those pending changes. Then I was able to merge branched_from_main back to main.
It is enough to check-in the folder that you are going to branch to.
In my case I created a new folder in my target branch and it was on the "Add" state (without check-in) and I had this same problem. After I checked in this folder it worked well.
Related
I have a branch created some time ago in TFS of our main trunk branch. I've periodically been merging trunk->branch to keep it up to date and now I'm ready to push back to trunk.
I have modified about 10 files in 3 projects, however when doing the merge TFS marks 7000 files as modified, seemingly every file in the branch. I can see that the files are nor modified in every case I check but I don't dare check them in without checking every file and clearly that's no good in this case!
In the Source Control Explorer view, all these files and folders are marked as "merge" in the "Pending Change" column.
Can I fix things somehow or do I need to undo the merge and manually merge only the files I know I actually modified, breaking the whole point of merging?
Reasons for this might be one of the listed items in Why are all files marked with 'merge' in TFS?
But there are other cases as well:
Another branch of the target branch had itself a branch that was renamed then merged to the child branch then that child branch was merged to your target branch;
There was a move or rename of your branch and it was rolled back (but you can see it in the changesets still);
The way I solved it was to do a merge using the "Selected changesets" instead of "All changes up to a specific version". Then in the following dialog, exclude the renaming attempts.
Once this is done, you will still have these changesets in the history bugging you for every merge, so you might want to discard them with "tf merge /discard".
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.
I have following situation:
I have created some new projects in solution in one development branch in TFS
I'm now merging them into the main branch.
Architect has idea to merge two new modules into one.
I have moved the code files
Project files has already been changed within the merge.
These files have pending changes in form merge, branch, edit. I wan't to make this file merge, branch, delete but TFS won't do that because the file has pending changes. Is it possible to force the deletion or undo edit without undoing merge, branch?
I don't want to try the merge again and combine files from two shelvesets... Is there any possibility to modify the status of pending changes?
No, TFS does not support that.
You could "undo" the file and just pend a delete instead.
As best practice you shouldn't be making changes as part of a merge, you should just do the minimum possible to resolve the conflicts and get it to build (or not even that sometimes) and then make your required changes in a subsequent check-in. This makes it easier to see in the version control history what changes were made when - I very rarely look to see if a merge of a change is any different from a prior edit.
For some unknown reason, TFS seems to keep queuing certain files for merges, even though there are no changes. In the Pending Changes windows, the Change column only states Merge, and not the usual Merge, edit or Merge, branch.
Nobody touches these files and yet they keep reappearing under the pending changes merge queue.
I've seen this happen before with a folder that was deleted, but kept reappearing in the merges between branches. In that case, I used tf destroy in all branches for that folder's path and it solved the problem. However, in this environment, it's with files that the team wants to keep.
Has anyone else experienced and/or resolved this issue?
Try TFS 2010 SP1 and CU1. It fixed some merge bugs. Like the following:
Merge or discard in both directions cause unnecessary "empty" merges
in future merge attempts.
If you have the Team Foundation Power Tools installed you can use tfpt uu to undo changes to any unchanged files (yes, it's well annoying when files are flagged as changed and you get told they are identical!).
I have a main branch and a dev branch in TFS. I merged changes from the main branch up into the dev branch fine. Now when I try merging up again it says there is nothing to merge.
However when I merge down from the dev branch to the main branch, it magically decides that a bunch of files have differences (which are only present in the main branch). Why does it decide this? Because TFS is comparing using the wrong changelist version from the dev branch! It is using the second to last changelist, not the latest one like I asked!
Sure I could resolve this by doing a force merge, but then every file in main would be marked as changed when it actually hasn't. What I want is for TFS to actually WORK in a logical way, does anybody know a work-around for this behaviour?
Even though this question has been asked a long time ago.
First things first, you are working on a dev branch and you have a main branch like the published one, so when you merge up to main you should get all changesets you checked in on dev branch.
If that is not the case, make sure you have nothing in pending changes to make sure you checked your changes in.
I work with a workspace for each branch not sure if you do this, make sure that you are on the workspace of the main branch and right click on dev branch and do the merge accordingly.
Hope this is what you were asking for.