April 14, 2010
About Surround SCM Rollbacks
Surround SCM
The ability to rollback changes is a basic functionality that any software configuration management tool should have. Surround SCM provides more than one way to rollback changes. You can rollback a file to any prior point in time and you can also choose to rollback a promote or a rebase.
The one thing I always like to point out is that rollbacks do not erase anything. If you have a file and you roll it back to a previous version, Surround SCM does not erase the current version. Rather, it creates a new version whose contents will be identical to the version that you rolled back to. You could almost think of a rollback action as a new check in.
This concept is not something that users sometimes realize. A common question that will come into our support group is something like this:
“I recently promoted a change from my Workspace branch to our Mainline branch. I did a rollback to an earlier version in my Workspace branch but when I try to do a rebase it tells me there is nothing to Rebase.” The user is trying to do a rebase as a way to re-apply the changes. However, this will not work. The error message the user receives is expected.
Let's take a closer look.
Surround SCM’s branching engine only applies new changes to your branches when a promote and rebase are performed. Surround uses common ancestor detection and some internal flagging mechanisms that allow the system to always know the difference between new changes to a branch and pre-existing changes to a branch.
As I mentioned, when Surround performs a rollback (either a file rollback or promote and rebase rollback) the previous version history is not discarded, so when a promote and rebase are performed after a rollback Surround still detects the earlier changes and will not apply the same set of changes a second time.
Let's use our old friend foo to help us explain this.
A file exists called foo that is identical between the Mainline and a Workspace branch. The original contents of the file will be called A and so looking at the two branches I can say the file contents are A, A (Mainline, Workspace).
The user checks in a new change (B) to the Workspace instance of the file. Now we can say, between the Mainline and Workspace, the file contents are A, A + B.
The files are now different between the Mainline and Workspace. However, when the user tries to perform a rebase, Surround will show no new changes because the contents known as A already exist in both locations.
The new change (B) is promoted to the Mainline. Now the file is identical again in both locations A +B, A + B.
The user performs a rollback in the Workspace and now the file contents are A + B, A + B – B.
It appears that a newer file exists in the Mainline since a Diff shows just the contents of A in the Workspace and A + B in the Mainline. When a rebase is performed Surround will still say no new changes. This is because both changes A and B are still present in the Workspace branch. Change B cannot be reapplied a second time.
This is what Surround sees; A + B, A + B – B and of course changes A and B are already present in the Workspace foo.h file.
If the user wants to get this file back to the pre-rollback contents then ‘another‘ rollback must be performed. The file contents now look like A + B, A + B – B + B resulting in no differences between the Mainline and Workspace. (The file history will show 1, 2, 3, 4 for the add, checkin, rollback to version 1, rollback to version 2).
To summarize:
Email sign up- Surround does not discard any history information, even during rollbacks.
- Surround does not allow changes to be re-merged more than once (I call this merge memory).
- As a result, a rollback will not result in pre-existing changes being re-applied during promote and rebase.