Perforce Stream Graph missing changes to child stream (red arrow to parent)

Question

in Perforce I go to the Stream Graph every morning to bring updates from parent stream to my feature stream. I always see a red arrow going from my feature stream to the parent. This marks that there are changes in my stream that the parent is missing, so that's normal. Today that red arrow is gone and in history I can't see anyone merging my branch to the parent (And no one would have any reason to do so since the feature just started development and had some minor changes merged with no actual functionality yet) I closed Perforce and re-opened it but the arrow is still gone, I fear I messed something up somehow.

Any ideas/suggestions/things I can check?

Answer 1

The hypothesis is that there is a change in your feature branch which has not been merged to the parent but which is not being shown in the stream graph. Let's look at some of the tools we have in Perforce to prove or disprove this hypothesis.

The very easiest thing to check is: what happens if you do a merge from the feature stream to the parent? Run a merge in "preview" mode -- does it say that there are files to merge? If so, then we know that merge is doing the expected thing, but the stream graph is out of date with it. This could be the result of the stream having been edited recently in a way that temporarily invalidated the cached merge status (see this article for more discussion).

Let's suppose that merge agrees with the stream graph. The next tool is to make your hypothesis more specific: identify a particular changelist that should require merging. The most recent changelist on your feature branch should be a good candidate. Open one of the files in that changelist in Revision Graph, and look for arrows between it and the parent stream. Is there:

• any kind of arrow from that revision back to the parent stream?
• a "copy" arrow from the parent stream overwriting that revision?
• either of the above but indirectly via some other stream?

If there's none of the above, and the file still doesn't require a merge, check the stream definitions. Is that file in a share path, or is it isolated from the parent? Are the options set to globally block or allow merges from this stream to the parent?