[p4] Integration messiness

[Brad Holt]

Hello All,

I've got a team that is running into trouble with integrations from
their branch.  We've been using branches for years, and at any one time,
we may have 20 or 30 branches out in development, so we've gotten pretty
used to them.  It's all gone rather well in most cases.

This particular branch though is having more than its share of merge
problems when coming back to main.  My hunch is that it has to do with
the nature of the integrations in this branch.  Like all other branches,
it regularly gets integrations up from it source branch (main).
However, unlike all our other branches, it also integrates back to main
quite frequently, so there is regular traffic to and from this branch.
I had seen this a while back with another branch where they had similar
problems, and mass integrated both directions frequently.  The problems
are typically things like changes getting lost, deleted portions getting
reintroduced, and things like curly braces getting badly interleaved.
When trying to trace back how this badness may have been caused, it all
gets remarkably complicated and remains so very subtle.  I have found
that I am seeing more "Merge with Edit" resolves than are typical of
most branches.

So I am hoping that one of you may have zeroed in on some more general
typical workflow problems that can cause these.  We're all windows,
p4Win and P4V, with the P4Win users mostly using Araxis for the
diff/merge.

Sorry to be so general.

-brad