Internal Conflict

(Just some background – at work we use DVCS with a one-branch-per-feature policy.) You know when you’ve got a few source control branches on the go, because you’ve been splitting time between a few features, but you’ve kind of been neglecting one, because it doesn’t feel like the most important thing to do? Don’t you hate it when you pull the latest mainline onto your neglected branch, and there are like a million changes, including adding/deleting/renaming files and major refactoring, and you get a bunch of merge conflicts? You’re thinking, “Why do people have to change so much all the time?” and you just want to blame someone. You know what makes it even worse? When you take a closer look at the list of changes, and realise it’s all the stuff that you’ve been pushing on to the mainline.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 11 November, 2009 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Development, Technology, VCS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One response to “Internal Conflict”


Prof Fate says:

That literally has never happened to me with ClearCase. I suggest avoiding branches. Also, try to get the rest of your team working in a shared directory. That solves most merging problems in my experience, which are usually caused by developers who change code and fiddle with DVCS instead of just using the preprocessor and file system features that have come standard for thirty years. HTH

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