Vault 2.0 - right way to checkin unknown status file?

[ancap]

Vault 2.0 release
Windows 2003/IIS6 server
XP Pro/SP1 clients

During a transition from VSS to Vault, there was a several day period where source control was unavailable and developers necessarily made off-line changes to files as the VSS repository with their last checked-in changes was imported to Vault. Now we are on Vault, they would like to check in their off-line changes.

I suggested the standard VSS way of handling this - check out the file without overwriting working copy, then check in the working copy. Due to Vault's concern with Unknown status, this does not work. I've read more now about the concurrency features and believe I understand why Vault tracks last retrieved version and how not having one could make a file status unknown. However, I do not understand why there appears to be no way to make an unknown status file known without overwriting it.

Checkout without overwrite leaves the file as unknown status. Checkin then does absolutely nothing (no undo-checkout, no checkin, no error dialog).

Checkout with overwrite destroys changes in working version - not what we want. Checkout with merge merges changes to get to repository tip from working copy rather than vice-versa, so is effectively the same as checkout with overwrite.

Enabling checkin without checkout in the concurrency options does not sense that the file working copy has changed, even if it is further edited. Check-in is greyed out.

Resolve merge status, which seemed somewhat promising, is always greyed out for these unknown status files.

The only workaround I've found is the simple but ugly process of copy all working files to another directory, check out the files with overwrite, copy all working files back, then checkin.

I realize that the need to checkin unknown status files hopefully will not be common after initial adjustment to a recently imported repository, but I expect others would encounter this scenario and it seems a bug for Vault not to support some way internally to accomodate it. If there already is a better way than copy/checkout-overwrite/copy-back/checkin to achieve this with Vault, please let me know. If not, I recommend it be added, either via having checkout without overwrite of an unknown status file set the last retrieved version to current, or a separate option similar to resolve merge status to manually do this. Let me know. Thanks.

Aaron

[jeremy_sg]

Aaron,

You are right, Vault makes users work hard because it could very easily get confused. We have some ideas to make the the handling of Unknown files better. For now, your copy-checkout-restore method is the only one that will truly work.

Hopefully, you'll never see another Unknown file again.