What are the asterisks for in the output of tf merge

Question

tf merge /recursive /candidate $/foo/ExUI $/bar/ExUI
Changeset Author                           Date
--------- -------------------------------- ----------
   23438  Fred_Bloggs                      04/05/2010
   23609  Jimmy_jones                      11/05/2010
   23943* John_doe                         25/05/2010

Can anyone explain what the asterisk is for in the above output. I assumed that it indicates changesets that include changes outside the scope of the current query and that are 'partial', but on investigation this is not the case.

Any offers? It would be really helpful if there were a way to identify such changesets. The current plan is that we are having to dump out the contents of each changeset to file and inspect manually for any changes outside the scope.

Answer 1

You should read the developer support teams post on Partial Merges in TFS – A Guide.

This could mean:

In the output you will see an asterisk (*) next to changeset 138 which indicates that it is a partial merge. That means that only part of changeset 138 has been merged into changeset 139. If we take a look at the merge candidates from Dev to Main, we will see that even though we already merged changeset 138 to Main, it is still a merge candidate. This is caused by the fact that the merge engine detected that there are still some changes in changeset 138 which were not propagated from Dev to Main.

I would read the whole post and see if it answeres your question.