The Branching Papers

Contributed by Laura Wingerd

Frequently (and Infrequently) Asked Questions about Branching, Integrating, Resolving, and Sundry Perforce-Related Topics

Branch Views

• Why use branch views?

• Is there a way to see what a branch view looked like in the past? Can this information be determined from "filelog" output?

Integrating and Resolving

• Is there a way to 'fake out' Perforce to tell it that a merge has already been done, or that it doesn't need to be done?

• I backed a change out of one codeline, but I don't want to back it out of the codeline that's branched from it. Now, every time I integrate between the two codelines, Perforce wants to integrate the "backing-out" change. Is there a way to tell it not to?

• We tried to integrate a single change from one branch to another but in the resolve step we saw hundreds of deltas that weren't in this change. Why was this?

Handling Renamed Files

• I have a file I renamed in one branch. When I try to integrate changes from that branch to another, Perforce insists on renaming the same file in the target branch. How do I prevent that?

• Why is Perforce so brain-dead when it comes to branching renamed files?

File Histories

• What is this "filelog" output telling me?

• How do I find out which changelists (not files) need integrating from one branch to another?

Branching Strategies

• I read through the manual about branching, but I just can't figure out how to apply it to our daily build procedures here. Our old SCM system has a completely different branching model. How do I set up our builds to work with Perforce?

• We have a product that will be ported and released on HP and on Solaris. Should we branch //depot/main into //depot/variant-hp and //depot/variant-sol? And then should we branch off of those for each release? That seems like a lot of branches to maintain.

• Will be we able to integrate bug fixes from our development branch into the our QA branch without dragging new feature-specific changes along with them? It there a way to mark the new development changes so that they won't get integrated into the QA branch?

• We've got three related codelines we'd like to set up in Perforce, but our current SCM system is so hopeless we don't have any branch or integration history to convert. How can we make these three separate directory trees into related Perforce branches?

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