Using Merge Manager


I had finished a big effort in development. Checked my code into the main branch we were working from. There were two separate branches that were making changes for another version of Windows. Then I found out that I needed to deploy my changes to Windows. You would think I could just move my code changes to the other branch. Not so fast.

In the past, I would manually do the merges. That is just painful, especially when my target is two other branches. This time around I decided to use the help of the Clearcase tool. I think it is called the Merge Manager. You choose your version, click on Merge, then click the target of the merge.

Things worked fine when the merge was simple. Sometimes I could not figure out how to select the correct destination. I just reverted back to manually promotion of the code. The real trouble came when the merge was complex. Me and other people made changes to the same places in the same files. Sometimes I could use Merge Manager to sort though the mess. Other times I had to go back to manual merging.

The bottom line is that for simple cases, Merge Manager helped me merge a lot of files much quicker. Yippee.