Merge for Branch in Source Control

[Mikef]

We would like to have the ability to maintain two different branches in a Source Control tool (SVN or TFS) and would like to have the capabliity of selectively merging the changes in a file.  We are currently running TestStand 2010 SP1.

The TestStand Diff tool is too complex.

Judging from the questions and feedback, there doesn't appear to be an effective way of doing this.

SVN seems to want to check in the ".ini" files like a binary, it won't allow selectively allowing the differences between files.

Has anyone figured out how to do this?

Mike

[dug9000]

The teststand merge/diff tool supports 3 way merge and is the best way to accomplish your goal (at least for .seq files). It can automatically merge if there are no conflicts and it can help you resolve conflicts if there are any. I'm not sure how best to integrate it with TFS or SVN, but with perforce it is really easy to do. Just go to the merge preferences settings and add the file differ as a custom merge application for the .seq file extension. The argument list should contain 4 file paths. The default order perforce uses works fine with TestStand's diff/merge tool and is: <base> <file1> <file2> <Merged>

What files are you trying to merge with .ini extension? Changes made to a type from two different branches cannot be merged.

-Doug

[j_dodek]

Hi,

as doug mentioned this working well in TortoiseSVN. You can use Tortoise's diff feature by adding the TestStandDiff-Tool to it.

But: you can not get rid of the complexcity of this tool. (even better than writing your own differ...)

Regards

Juergen

[dug9000]

If you have suggestions or feedback on improving the usability of the diff/merge tool, please feel free to post something to the idea exchange:

http://forums.ni.com/t5/NI-TestStand-Idea-Exchange/idb-p/teststandideas

Thanks,

-Doug

[Mikef]

I'll have to try that.  We're not really comfortable with the TestStand Diff tool, but I'm hoping that that is a matter of getting used to it.

  Because the tool has so many layers, it's difficult to figure out which lines go with specific changes.  I seem to feel more comfortable copying subsequences at a time, rather than using the Diff tool.

Actually, we do have the Diff tool being launched on the "Differences" in both SVN and TSF (we have 2 different product lines, both are not using TFS yet). But when faced with trying to merge 2 different branches, it becomes more difficult.

Thanks for the reply.

Mike

[dug9000]

Just want to make sure it's clear. The diff tool has two modes, diffing and merging. If you only specify two files, you will get diffing, if you specify 4 files you will get merging. Not sure if SVN handles merging the same way as perforce though, so I'm not  sure how easy it would be to use it as a 3rd party merge tool from svn.

-Doug