Correctly handling RENAME in SCM merge processing

Here's an interesting and detailed article by the team at Atlassian about the complexities of merging changes when the changes involve renamed files. In their case, they found that Git was substantially better than the older Subversion releases at handling this task, and migrating one of their projects to Git has resulted in improved handling of their merge and rename scenarios.

Perforce once suffered from similar problems, and the handling of renames has been a major focus over the past few years.

Happily, the implementation has gone well, and the new Perforce integration engine, which is now in its final testing, has received great feedback from our early users, and I'm excited about the upcoming release.

This will be the second major release of the Perforce server since I joined, and although I didn't work directly on the integration engine, I was glad to have contributed to the release in a number of other areas.

If you're struggling with how to correctly handle complicated rename and merge scenarios in your SCM procedures, check into Perforce; I think you'll be pleased with the sophistication of the Perforce server in this area!