Baseless merge!


Baseless merge in TFS ? or a Baseless Question? :-)


A colleague came over wondering for what someone asked him to do - and that is to merge two branches. I believe, the tool allows you to do that however, I wouldn't recommend it simply because it is a sort of sibling-sibling merge rather than (what it is intended for) parent-child merge.


Reference to support my perspective ...

How do I merge two branches?

To perform a merge, you can use the merge functionality in Source Control Explorer, or you can use the merge command-line tool. You can merge based on changeset, label, date, or version.
You might find that your branching structure becomes deeper than one level. If this happens, keep in mind that it is only possible to merge one level at a time. For example, consider the following source tree structure:
  • Development – Container for isolation development branches.
    • Feature A
      • Source
    • Feature B
      • Source
  • Main – Main integration build branch
    • Source
    • Other asset folders
  • Releases– Container for Release branches
    • Release 1
      • Source
    • Release 2 – Current release being locked down
      • Source
When the source code contained in the Release 2 branch changes, you might want to eventually merge that change into a Feature branch; for example, to incorporate a bug fix into the latest feature code. It is not easy to merge directly from Release 2 into Feature B; instead, you merge from Release 2 into its logical parent, Main, and then from Main into its logical child Feature B. If you need to merge between branches that do not have a direct parent-child relationship, you need to perform a baseless merge.


O.K., so what is a baseless merge?


The branch command will create a relationship between two folders. You can leverage this connection to perform merges of code between the branches. Branches that are not a direct child or a direct parent of the merge target do not have this relationship. As defined in MSDN, a baseless merge “performs a merge without a basis version. That is, allows the user to merge files and folders that do not have a branch/merge relationship. After a baseless merge, a merge relationship exists and future merges do not have to be baseless”.
A baseless merge will result in many more conflicts than a normal merge. However, after the first baseless merge, future merges between these branches will no longer be baseless, thus minimizing conflicts.
Baseless merges can only be created from the command line. Even after the first baseless merge, when a relationship has been created between the branches, future merges still need to be created from the command line.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

QuadKey - what it is?

Image
To start with, let me share an excerpt from MSDN as below: Bing Maps Tile System (Reference:   https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb259689.aspx ) Bing Maps provides a world map that users can directly manipulate to pan and zoom. To make this interaction as fast and responsive as possible, we chose to pre-render the map at many different levels of detail, and to cut each map into tiles for quick retrieval and display. This document describes the projection, coordinate systems, and addressing scheme of the map tiles, which collectively are called the Bing Maps Tile System. So if you follow the above references Bing Maps Tile System, you would get an idea that  - how the world map is kind of apportioned into a tile system and depending on what level of detail or zoom you are interested in, you would get a <N> character long quad-key.  For what I am involved with currently, we care to go for the maximum allowable detail to uniquely identify each geo-location,
Read more

Binding ENUM to WPF control - ComboBox

I believe, I explored quite a bit on finding the best approach for my requirement of binding Enum to WPF ComboBox and thought to share the gradual steps here for a one-stop place which hopefully will help similar minded technical enthusiast .. The simplest approach: You want to just bind Enum as it appears (verbatim) to the WPF combo .. Let's define a sample enum as follows: namespace {    public enum TestEnum    {       String1,       String2,       String3,       String4    } } All we now need is a way to leverage Enum - GetValues method to provide a list of values that lets you bind directly to the ComboBox via ItemSource. < ObjectDataProvider x : Key ="dataFromEnum" MethodName ="GetValues" ObjectType ="{ x : Type sys : Enum }" > < ObjectDataProvider.MethodParameters > < x : Type TypeName ="local:TestEnum" /> </ ObjectDataProvider.MethodParameters > </ ObjectDataProvider > Reference URL: ht
Read more