Merge Branches - Overwrite Target

[Tyrsius]

I searched the forums before posting, but all I found was a post from 2004, and I am hoping a better solution has been found since then (there solution was not a real solution).

We do development in primarily two branches: Release and Beta. It sometimes happens that the Release version did not receive any changes during Beta, and the Merge that needs to happen is really just the Beta Branch overwriting the Release Branch.

When doing a merge, even if I do not select automatic merge, the files will not just overwrite. If I select "resolve merge" after the wizard, it seems to perform an automatic merge anyway (Funny aside, diffmerge thinks the proper way to merge version numbers is to average them, wtf?!).

Is there a simple way to overwrite one branch with another?

[lbauer]

We don't have a specific solution for this as yet. Merge branches will only merge changes from one branch into the other, and tries to preserve any changes made in the target, merging rather then overwriting them.

We do have each a request 10346 logged for this functionality, I've added your "vote" and bumped it up in priority, though I don't know when it might be implemented.

If there were no changes made in the trunk, you could show merge on the changed files and select the working folder version. Is that not working for you?

[Tyrsius]

Showing merge works, but is tedious when merging multiple files, especially in instances where Vault decides that a resource file needs to be merged (such as a C# resx file), as the binary is not human-readable (which makes merging such files rather silly). It would be easier if overwrite were just an option in the merge branches wizard.

[lbauer]

Thanks for your comments. I've noted them in the feature request.

[Solburn]

Has this feature been added?

[lbauer]

It has not been added yet. We still have it in our item tracking database to consider for a future release.

[kobussej]

Has this feature been added?

[Beth]

This feature hasn't made it into a release.

There's a better way to deal with this than using the Merge Branches. What merge branches does it take the change sets that were applied to one folder, analyses them to make them into one change set, and applies them to the target. Wanting to make one folder look like another folder isn't really merging. What might work better for this case is to

• -- Check out the target location
  
  -- Perform a Get with overwrite from the original, but during the get you can change the location to which it should get. This won't change the working folder.
  
  -- Check in the target location.