TFS shows pending changes with status "merge". If I check these in, will any files change?

Question

I'm doing a merge of files in TFS. It's a bit tricky because some files in the target have been moved or deleted.

After doing the merge and resolving conflicts, TFS shows a number of pending changes with status "merge".

If I check these in, will any files change?

I'm thinking that if I check in pending changes that are shown (in the Change column) with status "merge" that this just updates merge records in TFS so that if I repeat the merge it won't try and re-merge these files unless they've changed. Is this right? I don't want to check in this great big list of files and end up changing the contents/names/deleted status of files.

Answer 1

As far as i understand, merge specifically means that its this revision contains the merge from a another branch. however, i think merge -only- represent the merge operation.

If a particular file is diffrent in the two branches the file will have the status "merge, edit" because it is both merged from the branch and changed content-wise.

So in other words, if you have a main-branch with 2 files, make a dev-branch of that, make a change in one of the files only and then to a merge, the pending changes on the main-branch should look like this:

FileA.cs > merge
FileB.cs > merge, edit

Answer 2

The merge status means that the file is checked out because of a merge operation. If you perform a check-in on this file, it will replace the previous version.

The file is already completely merged locally, so you can examine the content.

I stronly advice to be sure everything builds, and all unit tests (if you have any) succeed before checking in a merger like that.

Answer 3

If the files in your workspace are the same as the latest version the checkin won't include those files in the changeset.