I'm not a frequent user of branching, but now I'm trying to merge a hotfix that was created (by mistake) by a colleague, who's now on maternally leave for a year.

I have locked the hofix branch and clicked Promote Now. And, as the best practice says, if I try to close the branch at that stage I get another warning message that tells me to close down the branch. And this is where I get stuck.

When trying to merge the hotfix, I get this warning message:

Any good ideas on how I should handle this? I have tried to look it up in the community, but cannot find anything.

Thanks in advance.

Hi @Lars Peterson, 

in my opinion, the component you want to check in / merge must not be checked out / in edit in the trunk (target). That could already be the mistake.

The checked out document in your colleague's workspace would have to be reverted.

Best regards, Fabian

Hi @Fabian Woldsen,

Thanks for the quick reply. I cannot see that I can revert the changes as they are already checked in.

I might have gone to far already...

This is how the trunk looks like:

And this is how the hotfix looks like:

Hi @Lars Peterson, that means, you have already merged the changes into the trunk. In that case, you should be able to close down the branch (workspaces needs to be closed, I think they are closed already).

Hi @Fabian Woldsen

This it how it looks when I try to close the branch:

@Kevin Sylvester, did we already have such a picture when closing a branch? I don't think so...

Hi @Fabian Woldsen, 

in general we do not use the Hotfix feature, therefore we do not see this message. But I remember this from when I tested hotfixes initially.

@Lars Peterson: This message is totally normal at this state and you can read about it here: Best practices: Branching projects  (at the end of the section "Use a branch to hotfix Prod")

The warning message occurs because the production is currently based on the hotfix. As long as the production build is the hotfix-build, you cannot close the hotfix branch. In order to be able to close the branch, you would need to do a regular promotion from STG to PRD. In order keep your hotfix changes in the new build, you can merge the hotfix-changes to the trunk. The next Promotion will then create a new build based on STG, including the hotfix changes. As soon as the now build is promoted, you can close your hotfix branch.

I hope this clears it up for you. Best regards, Kevin

Thanks @Kevin Sylvester! (and @Fabian Woldsen for hooking up Kevin on this)

That was the thing I was looking for. The solution was simply to promote the trunk from STG to PRD! When that was made, it was no problem to close the hotfix branch. I could not find that information in the Best practices-document.

I'm glad that this community is really working!

@Apptio UserAssistance, is this something you can use/add to the Best practice: Branching projects -document?