Team development and resolving conflicting changes
File conflicts In a three-way file merge, a situation in which two revisions of a file differ from each other and from their base file. A file conflict can occur when multiple users have the same file opened for edit. can occur when you submit To send a pending changelist from the client workspace to the depot. a changelist The changes to files or stream specifications along with metadata, such as the list of changed files, their version numbers, the submitter of the changelist, and the submitter's description of the changes. A changelist is the unit of versioned work. containing a file that another user has edited and checked in. When conflicts occur, P4 schedules the conflict files for resolve. Conflicts must be resolved before the changelist that contains the conflicting files can be successfully submitted.
To resolve a file: right-click the file in the Pending Changelist pane and choose Resolve... There are two methods to resolve file conflicts:
Automatic Resolve: to resolve without launching the merge utility, specify how you want to resolve the conflicting files.
The options available when auto-resolving are as follows:
- Accept source: accept the latest version of the file in the depot, containing changes made by other users
- Accept target: accept the version of the file you checked out and changed in your workspace
- Safe automatic resolve: accept only when source or target differs from base 1. For files: The file revision that contains the most common edits or changes among the file revisions in the source file and target file paths. 2. For checked out streams: The public 'have' version from which the checked out version is derived. See also 'have list'.
- Allow merging with no conflicts: Resolve by merging, skipping files with conflicts
- Allow merging with conflict markers: Resolve by merging, replacing your workspace's file with the merged result, including any conflict markers
Interactive Resolve: to run the merge utility so you can compare the conflicting files and choose individual chunks, or edit the file contents, choose Manual Resolve.
By default, you are prompted to choose the resolve method. To avoid having to do this every time, you can select and set a default resolve method, and the Resolve wizard will use the UI that corresponds to your selected default resolve method.
You can change the default resolve method in the preference page under Team > P4 > Resolve. You can also customize the resolve options in the resolve preference page.