How can I merge "off-line" changes?

christian · Post by **christian** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 2:40 pm

Hi,
I'm rather hoping that I can use the features of Vault to merge some "off-line" changes I've performed against some files back into Vault.

Here's what's happened:
I've imported our main source safe database into Vault (today);
A few weeks before that I took a copy of the files from the working directory of that source safe database to work "off-line" on those files on my laptop;
I now want to check those changes into Vault;
To complicate things, during those two weeks working from this snapshot, the files in the source safe database changed. These changes are in Vault as a result of the import.

So really what I have is a branch (my offline snapshot) that needs merging back into the main repository (now a Vault database) but I have no baseline from which to perform a three-way merge.
Is there any way I can ease my pain using your diff and merge tool. I don't really know where to start!!

Thanks in advance
Christian

dan · Post by **dan** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 3:25 pm

Is there a version of files in Vault that correspond to the orginal VSS files you started with? If so, you can do a historical get on those files from Vault (to your working folder), then overwrite those files with the modified ones. Their status will go to Needs Merge, and then you can manually merge them.

christian · Post by **christian** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 3:30 pm

If what you mean by original files is the snapshot of the working directory that I took off-line, then no!

dan · Post by **dan** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 4:11 pm

For merge to work, you have to have a baseline of some kind, so you might be out of luck.

One thing you could try is to simply do a Get from Vault on a version of the file that you know are earlier than the version you started with. Then, you could see what a Show Differences reveals or a Show Merge. Since you don't have a true baseline, the results won't be exact, but they would be closer than started with the latest version:)

In the end, you are trying to identify the changes that you have made, and make sure only those get checked into the tree, so anything that helps with that would get you farther down the path.

christian · Post by **christian** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 4:34 pm

dan wrote:
One thing you could try is to simply do a Get from Vault on a version of the file that you know are earlier than the version you started with. Then, you could see what a Show Differences reveals or a Show Merge. Since you don't have a true baseline, the results won't be exact, but they would be closer than started with the latest version:)

It gets worse. The source safe database that was imported into Vault didn't come with any history! It was created from the latest version of the files in the source safe db we've been working against up till now.

Here's what I did try:
Deleted my working directory.
Copy in its place the current set of files that I've been working on "off-line"
Do a Get from Vault seleting merge latter - this shows me what files are different.
This is as far I get as I can't seem to find a way to view the repository file and the working directory file and manually merge the changes from the repository into the working directory file! Would I've got further if I had checked out the files first (without retriving the repository files)?
Thanks
Christian