Resolving conflicts
When updating or committing you may encounter conflicts. A conflict occurs
when you have locally modified a resource for which a more recent revision is
available in the branch in the repository. Specifically, the branch will contain
a revision newer than the base revision of your resource. In this situation
you can choose to do one of the following:
- You can take the change from the branch, discarding your local work. This
could occur if you have made unintended changes locally, or if you realize
that the revision in the repository is better than yours. Overwriting your
local changes should be done with caution since you are in essence throwing
work out.
- You can commit your change, subsuming the revision in the repository. This
should be done with great caution since you are in essence throwing away someone
else's work. In particular, the change you are overwriting may have other
dependencies in the branch (for example there may be other incoming changes
which depend on the conflict).
- You can merge your work and the repository resource, saving locally the
merged resource. You may then later choose to commit this merged result.
Typically, you will want to take the third option, that is to merge, because
of the loss of work issues with the other two choices.
The Synchronize View indicates those resources which are in conflict with the
branch. For a given resource in conflict, typically you will want to merge your
changes with changes in the branch's resource.
For example, let us assume that both you and another team member
have modified the same html page. Opening that resource from the Synchronize
view will display a comparison of the local resource and the branch revision.
By cycling through and merging the individual changes, you can decide for each
change whether to accept the incoming change, reject it, or merge it with your
local changes. When you are finished merging, you save your changes. This overwrites
your local resource with the result of the merge. You can subsequently commit
this merged resource.
Tip: When merging changes, it is often convenient to be able to distinguish
which files you have completed merging. When you're done merging a file, you
can pick Mark as Merged from the context menu. This will change the status
of the file from being a conflict to being an outgoing change.
You can merge differences in the Synchronization view on two levels:
-
Whole Document - In the Synchronize view, open the resource that
you want to merge in a Compare editor. In the Compare editor, click the Copy
all non-conflicting Changes from Right to Left button to copy all non-conflicting
changes. Conflicting changes will have to copied individually.
-
Current Change - In the Text Compare editor, either use the Go to
Next Difference and Go to Previous Difference buttons to navigate to the change
that you want to merge, or simply click in either source pane somewhere in
the desired change difference fragment. Click the Copy current change from
right to left button as needed to overwrite the highlighted fragment either
with the corresponding modification in the branch.
It is also possible to have your changes automatically merged for you. For
any resource marked as ASCII, performing a Team > Update will automatically
merge into your local resource differences with the branch resource. This works
fine provided there are no lines with conflicting changes. If there are, CVS
inserts special markup in the file to indicate those lines which could not be
merged.
Updating from within the Synchronization view works a bit differently. In the
case of a conflict, Update will only process files whose contents
contain no conflicts. Files that have content conflicts will be skipped and
left in the Synchronize view as conflicts.
Team programming with CVS
Synchronizing with a CVS repository
Three way comparisons
Synchronizing with the repository
Updating
Committing
Merging from a branch
Comparing resources
Merging changes in the Compare editor
Compare editor
