Prevent change propagation for single files

Question

I work with Perforce streams, following the suggested mainline model (release, mainline and development streams). In addition, we use a odd/even release version numbering (similar to linux kernel) with odd minor version numbers for development versions, even minor numbers for release versions.

After fixing a bug in a release stream, I need to update several files with version information to create a new release version/installer. These version changes must not be merged to mainline (only the bugfix itself), because the version of the mainline has been already increased to the next development version.

Now, when merging from the release stream to main, I get conflicts for all files containing version information. Currently, I need to manually resolve all conflicts, undoing the version number change (keeping the development version).

Example:

• Release stream started with version 2.4.0 (stable/release version number)
• Increase mainline version to 2.5 (next development version)
• Fix bug in release stream, increase version number to 2.4.1
• Merge changes to mainline: accept bugfix, manually undo conflicts in version files

Is there a way to exclude single files / a set of files from integration so that I don't have to go through this tedious (and potentially error-prone) manual process? (NB: The version information is separate from the code.)

Answer 1

Three possible options:

1) Specify these files as "isolate" in the stream spec so that changes to them are isolated, i.e. not included in copy/merge operations.

2) Merge the version changes but use "resolve -ay" (ignore) to specify that these changes are to be ignored.

3) Revert these files after opening them for a merge operation so that you will not need to resolve or submit them.