Fuzzy on branching and sharing

[HankB]

Hi folks,
I've reviewed the material at http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=9 and http://download.sourcegear.com/misc/vau ... nches.html and I don't think I am getting it.

My particular situation at the moment is that I have made a bunch of changes to files in the project and wish to set them aside (but not get rid of them) so I can make some changes in the main branch. The brute force way to do this would be to zip up the entire project, delete the project directory and perform a "Get Latest Version." However restoring those changes after making other changes would be pretty tedious.

I'm pretty sure that the right way to do this would have been to branch first and make my changes in the branch, merging to the main branch if we decided to keep the changes. With that thought in mind, I think the next best way to go would be to zip up my project, create the branch and then unzip the changes over the branch. (There have been no other commits since I started making changes.) With all of the changes copied to the new branch, I could then delete and restore the main branch to the most recent commit.

Am I overlooking some Vault operation that would do all of this?

Thanks!

[Beth]

You could create the branch and check in your changes to the branch to merge back later, or you could save all you changes into a Shelve instead. If you're on an old version of Vault, then you might not have Shelve.

What shelving does is save your changes to a location in the Vault database, but not as part of your current tree. It's about the equivalent of zipping up your changes and setting them aside, except these get backed up with the server, and can be retrieved to any machine. Also, when you shelve, you can automatically revert your working folder to what you had prior to changes.

Later on you can unshelve and merge your changes into the latest code on disk and pick up where you left off.

[Beth]

One more place where you can find information on Branching and Merge: http://ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html.

[HankB]

Hi Beth,
Thank you for the quick reply. It sounds like Shelve is the operation I want.

best,
hank