TFS 2010 wants to branch / merge every file

Question

We just upgraded to TFS 2010. We created a development branch for each project. If changes are made in Branch1 and then Branch1 is merged back into the baseline, it merges every file instead of just the changed files.

Subsequent changes to files in Branch1 and then merging to the baseline result in only those changes being merged (which is what we want) unless changes from Branch2 were merged in between the first and second merge of Branch1, then every file merges again (which we don't want).

How can we make it so only changed files get merged everytime?

Answer 1

You can try to merge specific change sets instead of upto the latest change sets. That way you can even control which changes get merged into other branches instead of all changes being merged at the same time.

Also, when there are no changes, the automerge should take care of the files without creating any problems. What specific problems are you facing?

Answer 2

I believe the problem was that we had created the development branches, then deleted them, then recreated them. We ran into a problem similar to this in the past where a file was deleted, then a new file was added with the same name. The fix for the past problem was to do a baseless merge. Rather than go through that we decided to just delete the development branches and rebranch them with different names.