Don’t delay your merging

Another one of those lessons learned posts. I know I’m supposed to merge changes across branches often to minimize the pain, but I didn’t do it.

Here’s the scenario: We’ve got 3 development branches: 6.3, 6.4, and 7.0 (the trunk). 6.3 and 6.4 are technically maintenance branches because we didn’t anticipate needing to them, but we are. Here’s where it gets funny. 6.4 is actually a branch off of 7.0 with some new features removed. 6.4 is the code base converted to handle unicode. 6.3 is the current development version, and it’s features need to be merged into 6.4 These two branches are rather divergent in places. It’s been months since the branches were synchronized. In addition to 20 conflicted files, the 13 localized resource DLLs can’t automatically be merged because their location changed. Yeesh…

So now I’m spending all day using DiffMerge to do these files. Not a fun day…

Lesson learned. Do frequent merges.

At least it’s Friday. Tomorrow, my wife and I are heading down to North Carolina to visit my grandmother before she heads to California for Christmas.

By the way, still no Internet at home. Comcast says it could be 28 days before the local construction company gets around to installing the new drop to our home. I’ve been getting a lot of piano practice and reading in.