Perforce merge sucks

Tuesday 9 December 2003 — This is nearly 21 years old. Be careful.

I really like Perforce as a source control system. It is clean, and solid, and has great support. But its merge tool blows giant chunks. It looks like a Win16 application, and uses an entire spectrum of confusing (and ugly) colors. I could deal with any of that, here’s the clincher: it occasionally inserts newlines into the merged files! Identifiers get split across two lines, and the compile breaks. What’s up with that!?

Comments

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andrew 9:04 AM on 9 Dec 2003
Two words: Araxis Merge.

The fact that Perforce offers the ability to put third party tools in there speaks volumes. Specifically, it says, "Please put a third party tool in there!"

If you absolutely need to have it merges right, Araxis is the way to go. Of course, it *is* $180/seat. Grumble...
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Kyle 12:42 AM on 10 Dec 2003
We've seen this happening when merging from a development branch back into a mainline branch for builds too. Fortunately not very often.
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Bob 10:53 AM on 10 Dec 2003
Araxis Merge is great, I used it with CVS and it worked pretty well. The absolute apex of merge tool complexity has to be the Clearcase Diff/Merge tool. It's incredibly powerful but not for the faint of heart. It doesn't screw up merge results like Perforce but unless you understand how to use it, you can screw up merge results yourself. I ended up doing a presentation for my team to explain how to use it properly.
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Barry 2:03 PM on 16 Dec 2003
Just tell them, they're pretty quick at dealing with customer issues, whether you're using the personal edition or per-seat edition.
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simon 12:03 PM on 3 Jan 2010
This is great. 2009, now 2010, and there are still plenty of merge issues using perforce. Would not expect a 'mature tool' to mess up merging xsl and xml documents. And yes, get away from the color scheme and shore up the merging tool.

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