- Isolate Your Work to Control Change
- Update Your Workspace to Keep Current
- Unresolved Issues
- Further Reading
Update Your Workspace to Keep Current
After a workspace has been populated, the codeline may continue to evolve. If the work in your workspace is isolated for too long, the versions in the workspace can become outdated. A workspace update operation will "refresh" the outdated versions in your workspace, replacing them with the versions from the latest stable state of the code-line. If any of the files you changed are also among the set of "newer" files from the codeline, merge conflicts may occur and will need to be reconciled.
You should do a workspace update before you merge your changes back to the codeline during a Task Level Commit. You will need to rebuild using a Private System Build, or at least recompile immediately after the update, to find and fix quickly any inconsistencies introduced by the new changes. If desired, immediately before updating your workspace, checkpoint it using a label or Private Versions to ensure that you can roll back to its previous state.
You may also update your workspace at known stable points, as well as right before you are about to check out a new set of files, to ensure that your workspace remains stable without growing "stale." This enables you to find out early on if any recently committed changes conflict with any changes in your workspace. You may then reconcile those changes in your Private Workspaceat incremental intervals, instead of waiting until the end to do all of them at once.