Perforce: How to integrate across several branches?

Question

I have the following situation of branches in a Perforce repository: There’s a mainline “trunk” and two release branches “1.0” and “1.1”. A branch “customer” with customer specific changes has been branched off the 1.0 branch. Now the customer wants to move to version 1.1. How can I merge the 1.1 branch into the customer branch? The customer specific changes should remain “on top” of 1.1.

Here’s a diagram for one affected file:

1.1                      -(1)---(2)---(3)
                        /           \     \
                       /             \     \
trunk   100--(101)-(102)--103---104---105---106---107
           \
            \
1.0          ---1-----2--...
                 \
                  \
customer           ---1-----2----*3*

The current version of the file I’m looking at is revision 3 on the customer branch.

If I choose to integrate branch “1.1” with target “customer” I would have expected that the common ancestor of both is found (revision 100 on mainline) and all revisions from there leading to the tip of the 1.1 branch are merged (the ones in parentheses).

Instead Perforce only offers to merge revisions 1 to 3 of the 1.1 branch, which fails because it misses the necessary changes that happened on mainline before.

How can I persuade Perforce to do this without having to look at each file manually and selecting the revisions to merge? Maybe the branching strategy is unsuitable? What else should I do?

Answer 1

When you try to integrate revision 3 from your 1.1 branch, Perforce will only tell you that it's integrating changes on that particular branch -- but revision 1 already contains trunk revisions 101 and 102. When merging, Perforce will identify trunk revision 100 as the common ancestor for conflict resolution.

It's been my experience that the integration you're trying to do should Just Work. Are you seeing changes missing in your integrated source (that can't be explained by improper conflict resolution), or are you just looking at the output of p4 interchanges?