Smart Merge not working

I noticed that different tools handle the commandline tools differently.

When using Tortoise Git there is info being displayed. When using Sourcetree everything is handled in the background silently. So if Im uncertain I use tortoise git to merge my scenes to check if it goes ok.

 

I'm on OSX and I actually have an issue where using Smart Merge completely clears a file's contents when I use it. I use Sourcetree on git version 2.7.4 using the Smart Merge included with Unity 5.3.4f1. When I use it either through SourceTree or the Terminal, it boots me to FileDiff, and the Terminal outputs what seems like it finding diffs but then that boots me to FileDiff too.

The result when it's done is always a completely empty file, unreadable by Unity.

 

UnityYAMLMerge doesn't work for me on Ubuntu 15.10.
Here is the output I get:

$ git mergetool --tool=unityyamlmerge
Merging:
myGame/Assets/Game.cs
myGame/Assets/myGame.unity

Normal merge conflict for 'myGame/Assets/Game.cs':
{local}: modified file
{remote}: modified file
Couldn't locate dir of factory merge spec file

Couldn't locate dir of factory merge spec file
Couldn't load spec file 'mergespecfile.txt'

myGame/Assets/Game.cs seems unchanged.
Was the merge successful? [y/n] n
merge of myGame/Assets/Game.cs failed
Continue merging other unresolved paths (y/n) ? y

Normal merge conflict for 'myGame/Assets/myGame.unity':
{local}: modified file
{remote}: modified file
My path is invalid

Cannot open rules file for reading:mergerules.txt

myGame/Assets/myGame.unity seems unchanged.
Was the merge successful? [y/n] n​

After this both files are with conflicts stay unchanged.
I've added the tool's location into path. Both files 'mergespecfile.txt' and 'mergerules.txt' exist and have 777 permissions.
The Unity version:

Version 5.3.2f1 (112c408b1c75) Personal
Mon, 08 Feb 2016 15:20:19 GMT
Branch: 5.3/linux/editor​

My Ubuntu is 15.10.
Please help!

 

Thanks for responding! I am a novice regarding Windows batch scripting but am slowly learning the ropes.

I managed to detect UnityYAMLMerge setting errorlevel 1 when the tool encounters a conflict but lacks a fallback program (not errorlevel 2 like I expected, but as long as the errorlevel is non-zero then its all the same to me). I did this by purposely disabling the P4Merge entry from the list of default merge programs given in mergespecfile.txt.

My latest problem is that, when UnityYAMLMerge does fall back to P4Merge, P4Merge does not appear to update the errorlevel no matter the outcome of merging. Does anyone know how to detect when p4merge.exe saves the merged file?

Thanks,
Chris

 

@jdrewsen I have just submitted a bug report with some scenes attached that cause UnityYAMLMerge to crash. I'm in the middle of a big branch catch up and have two scenes that crash the merger... Any chance you could take a look ASAP? Thanks!

 

Hi @jdrewsen, I am attempting to use UnityYAMLMerge with SVN on a Mac. I've edited the ~/.subversion/config file to include merge-tool-cmd = /Applications/Unity/Unity.app/Contents/Tools/UnityYAMLMerge as instructed, but scene merges still all result in conflicts, just as before. I've ensured that our scene files are in YAML format, and that the mime-type property for the scene file is set to text/plain. What else can I do to try to get it to work, or to determine whether svn is attempting to run UnityYAMLMerge?

 

Hi @jdrewsen and everyone,

Today I tried really hard (for something like 4 hours) try to make UnityYAMLMerge work with tortoiseGit.
Get the setup working was actually pretty easy, but then the problems started.

First thing I noticed was that it took like 40 seconds to parse my scene (its a 55k line file, 2.3MB, so it looked ok).

After that, UnityYAMLMerge reported (correctly) 1 conflict in an integer attribute, and tried to open the three way diff in my fallback merge tool (and that took another 40 seconds to happen). But, for my surprise, my merge tool (I tried with tortoiseGitMerge and Per4Merge) reported that there were no differences whatsoever between any of the files (base, mine or theirs).

After trying to reconfigure everything and restarting my computer (who knows) I tried again with the exact same scene merge and, for my surprise, UnityYAMLMerge crashed. 100% reproduceable, I tried 3+ times and it crashed on all of them. =/

After that I tried once again, reconfigured everything, reverted my merge and did it again. This last time it took more than 5 minutes to do the merge, reported (correctly) 1 conflict in an integer attribute, and after another 2 minutes waiting it opened the fallback merge tool. Another surprise, all three files were empty. On this last attempt, I also noticed that right before opening the merge tool, it was using 500MB of memory, and during the 7 minutes it was working it used 15 to 20% of my processor.

Some information about my setup/machine:
Unity 5.3.4f1 x64, Processor i7 3630QM, Windows 10

I have no idea where to even start reporting this, IF one or any of these are a bug.

Maybe I can send you my conflicted scene so you can check it out?

PS.: This is my first post here at Unity forums =P

 

I have a similar crash as other users have gotten. The crash is the generic the program has stopped working on Windows. I am using Unity 5.1.1f. I followed the manual to link Perforce to .unity and .prefab files as described here: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SmartMerge.html and updated the mergespecfile.txt to use p4merge as the fallback. Despite these steps I am still getting a hard crash when trying to run the merge tool when resolving in Perforce. Any ideas? Thanks.

 

I've run into a problem using UnityYAMLMerge on OSX. It never seems to call the fallback merge tool.

I've tried configuring the mergespecfile.txt in multiple ways for both Perforce and Araxis, and the fallback tool never gets launched.

When configured as an external merge tool in P4V, It fails silently when doing a resolve,

When I run it from the command line I do get the merged output file, but it seems the fallback tool never gets launched.

OSX version 10.8.5 Oh - By the way, it seems to work fine in Windows...

Here's the command line script I'm testing with:

/Applications/Unity/Unity.app/Contents/Tools/UnityYAMLMerge merge -p NetworkScoreBarUI.prefab NetworkScoreBarUI.prefab NetworkScoreBarUI1.prefab wow1

As I said, the file "wow1" gets created.

Please let me know if I can help hunt this down.

 

For people using SourceTree I wrote a custom action that works along with the git setup on https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SmartMerge.html

So if add the:
[mergetool "unityyamlmerge"]
trustExitCode = false
cmd = '<path to UnityYAMLMerge>' merge -p "$BASE" "$REMOTE" "$LOCAL" "$MERGED"
segment to your .gitconfig (which on windows 10 is under Users\[USERNAME]\.gitconfig)

Then you make the custom command as follows: (You might need to change the path to the git.exe depending on where it is installed on your system). You can untick the check boxes if you want - that's up to you.


Then you just select the file you want to resolve click Actions > Custom Actions > UnityYAMLMerge

I've only tried it one file at a time so if multiple files fail then you'll need to figure out what's going wrong there.
Hope it helps someone

 

Thank you David; that is useful information. I'd just like to add that I had to include the following setting in my .gitconfig

[mergetool]
prompt = false

Otherwise, git prompts the user to press return to start the merge using the tool, and this prompt is not displayed in the SourceTree window, and there is no way to respond to it. From the user's perspective the window will just sit there forever trying to do the merge but not getting anywhere. That setting fixed the issue for me.


Edit:
In case @jdrewsen sees this, is it possible to add ".controller" as one of the extensions UnityYAMLMerge will handle without the --force flag? Using a Custom Action is my workaround to that problem, since I don't want to --force it to merge all files in general. Thanks!

 

Hey,

I have a similar issue on Debian 8. I found a workaround for the:
Cannot open rules file for reading:mergerules.txt
I just copied the mergerules.txt and mergesolving.txt in the git folder where I run "git mergetool". It is not ideal but at least the two files are found. I don't know in which environment variable I need to specify the location path of the tool.

Now unityYAMLmerge starts the merge but I didn't succeed to configure the fallback tool to continue the merge. I would like to use meld so I configured mergesolving.txt like that:
unity use /usr/bin/meld %b %l %r -o %d
prefab use /usr/bin/meld %b %l %r -o %d
* use /usr/bin/meld %b %l %r -o %d

But it is not working: Couldn't locate merge tool to handle extension in mergespecfile.txt
It is the same with kdiff3. Any idea? Thanks a lot!

 

Thanks for the feedback. Before sending any file, I guess my first question is: does unityyamlmerge work with Linux? I am using the 5.4.1 build from here http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-on-linux-release-notes-and-known-issues.350256/
But it seems that unityyamlmerge is not able to find the location of the install path (where mergerules.txt and mergesolving.txt are), and cannot launch a fallback merge tool (see my previous post).
Besides the documentation https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SmartMerge.html only mentions Windows and OSX. So can we use the smartmerge under Linux?

 

Yes, thank you. I didn't know about the arguments -i, --rules and --fallback. Now the config files are found.
I have also configured mergespecfile.txt to use kdiff3 as a fallback (see enclosed). It seems to work pretty well.

Thanks again!

 

I wasn't able to get unityyamlmerge working until 5.5, but the version with the beta is working for almost all of my scene and prefab files. This is very exciting, since scene merges have been a real problem for us. Thanks for the wonderful tool!

However, out of several dozen files, it fails on three. I'm figuring they're triggering edge case bugs with the tool. I was hoping you could look into them for us. Any advice would be gratefully received. If we can change the files to workaround the crash, that would be great.

To confirm, this is using the tool from Unity 5.5.0b4, although the project the files are in is Unity 5.3.4p2. Most files merge fine, these are rare exceptions. And this is on OSX 10.11.6.

I've attached the files in question.



Two fail with a useful error message:


Output result: 78
Clone base roots: 0
Merging premerge: 9
libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type std::runtime_error: Cannot find transform parent for fileID
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/libexec/git-core/git-mergetool--lib: line 133: 96899 Abort trap: 6 /Applications/Unity_5.5.0b4/Unity.app/Contents/Tools/UnityYAMLMerge merge -p --describe --timing $BASE $REMOTE $LOCAL $MERGED
Eclair/Assets/Dynamic/Core/Prefabs/TopPanelCanvas.prefab seems unchanged.
Was the merge successful? [y/n]


The remaining one fails with the slightly less useful:


tims-mbp:Eclair tim$ git mergetool Eclair/Assets/Dynamic/Scenes/GachaScene.unity

Merging:

Eclair/Assets/Dynamic/Scenes/GachaScene.unity


Normal merge conflict for 'Eclair/Assets/Dynamic/Scenes/GachaScene.unity':

{local}: modified file

{remote}: modified file

Reading unique keys: 0

Read base, left and right: 1315

Read files: 1315

Creating mappings: 0

Preprocess mappings: 10

Waiting for left diff: 16

Creating diffs: 16

Merging: 0

Cloning base roots: 8

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/libexec/git-core/git-mergetool--lib: line 133: 97036 Segmentation fault: 11 /Applications/Unity_5.5.0b4/Unity.app/Contents/Tools/UnityYAMLMerge merge -p --describe --timing $BASE $REMOTE $LOCAL $MERGED

Eclair/Assets/Dynamic/Scenes/GachaScene.unity seems unchanged.

Was the merge successful? [y/n]


Thanks!
Tim

 

As this is probably the most appropriate place to ask, next to reddit maybe (where I have posted the same issue in hope to get some intel):


I am working with a small team in a student project. We are using TortoiseSVN (GUI) together with Unity, but what troubles us the most are unmergeable scenes. That's when I discovered SmartMerge with this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/39bdq5/how_to_solve_scene_conflicts_with_unitys_smart/

So I set up my and my mates TortoiseSVN clients with the merge-tool-cmd in %appdata%\subversion\config as described here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SmartMerge.html

When I am now working in a scene doing things, and a mate commits his changes to the very same scene, I still get conflicts after shooting an Update.

So, is anyone here having some sort of advice or even a solution for this problem? Not beeing able to merge scenes is one of the biggest drawbacks right now.

Cheers, and thanks

 

It's the scene itself (as wel las .prefabs) that arent merging at all.
Thats the reason why I want SmartMerge in the first place: We are a small team who work in the same scene all the time. Not beeing able to Merge it is just a pita.

I cannot hand you any files since I would have to send you the whole project. For me, it looks like TortoiseSVN isnt firing YAMLMerge when theres a conflict, but I added the merge-tool to the subversion config.

 

@Redphoenix666

I am also trying to integrate SmartMerge into my studio's existing Windows + TortoiseSVN workflow. Here is what I have found:

1. Despite what https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SmartMerge.html suggests, setting

[helpers]
merge-tool-cmd = <path to UnityYAMLMerge>​

in the Subversion config is not honored by TortoiseSVN. Instead, I must instruct TortoiseSVN to use SmartMerge for .unity and .prefab extensions by following the instructions given for TortoiseGit. (Right-click any empty area in Windows Explorer, select TortoiseSVN, select Settings, select Merge Tool, select Advanced, and add new entries for .unity and .prefab.) Here is the exact string I use:

"C:/Program Files/Unity/Unity542f2/Editor/Data/Tools/UnityYAMLMerge.exe" %base %mine %theirs %merged foo​

Be sure to change the path to wherever your SmartMerge is located. Also note that if SmartMerge is launched without the first argument being merge, then SmartMerge assumes an SVN client is launching it and thus expects exactly five arguments, where the first four are the files needed for merging and the last is the "wcfile", which doesn't seem to matter so I just pass in "foo".

2. Even after setting TortoiseSVN to use SmartMerge for .unity and .prefab files, TortoiseSVN will not automatically launch SmartMerge upon encountering a versioning conflict for those files (i.e. after an update). Instead, TortoiseSVN automatically attempts a typical text-merge (i.e. a non-interactive merge), and only then reports the files as conflicted should that fail. For non-trivial .unity and .prefab files, this fails nearly every time.

3. So what did setting SmartMerge as the .unity and .prefab conflict solver actually do? It declared to TortoiseSVN that SmartMerge is the interactive merge tool for those files, i.e. the tool launched when we right-click a conflicted file in Windows Explorer, select TortoiseSVN, then select Edit Conflicts. SmartMerge finally begins its work.

4. If SmartMerge cannot merge the conflicting files by itself, then it will fall back to one of the merging tools defined in mergespecfile.txt. If you have installed P4Merge in the default location, then SmartMerge should find and launch P4Merge without issue. I have also successfully directed SmartMerge to find and launch TortoiseMerge just for fun. Regardless of the merge tool, the conflicts must be manually edited and saved by you.

5. Despite my efforts, I have not been able to get TortoiseSVN to notice that I have saved & closed the merge tool, thus automatically marking the conflict as resolved and deleting the .mine, .rOldRev, and .rNewRev files. Instead, I must inform TortoiseSVN manually by right-clicking the now-merged file, the selecting TortoiseSVN, then selecting Mark Resolved. This is a departure from typical interactive merges, which is annoying.

If anyone sees any mistakes or misunderstandings above, please let me know!

I hope that helps!
-Chris



BONUS: I have attached the SVN config, mergespecfile.txt, and mergerules.txt files to this post. Getting SmartMerge integrated into TortoiseSVN does not require any modifications to these files, but there are some useful options available.

In the SVN config file, you may notice that I have added the following unnecessary but convenient options:

[miscellany]
preserved-conflict-file-exts = doc ppt xls od? unity prefab
enable-auto-props = yes

[auto-props]
*.unity = svn:mime-type=text/yaml
*.prefab = svn:mime-type=text/yaml​

The preserved-conflict-file-exts will cause the .mine, .rOldRev, and .rNewRev filenames to always end in .unity (or .prefab) so that SmartMerge will not be fooled into thinking these are unknown file types. (Otherwise, you will need to use the --force parameter to force SmartMerge to attempt merging the files.) The auto-props will allow TortoiseSVN to understand that .unity and .prefab files are YAML text files, not binary files, and are thus eligible for non-interactive merges.

In the mergespecfile.txt, I added a TortoiseMerge entry like so:

# Tortoise Merge
* use "%programs%\TortoiseSVN\bin\TortoiseMerge.exe" -base:"%b" -theirs:"%r" -mine:"%l" -merged:"%d"​

And in the mergerules.txt, I added the following exclusions for Transforms:

exclude *.Transform.m_LocalPosition
exclude *.Transform.m_LocalRotation
exclude *.Transform.m_LocalScale​

 

@khris1rino Are you the one @jdrewsen was referring to as the new maintainer of SmartMerge?

To answer your question, I excluded the Transform properties because I was encountering the problems described here: https://community.unity.com/t5/Exte...Merging-With-Undesirable-Results/td-p/2520835. That behavior seems to have been fixed since I first encountered it months ago, so I have now removed my Transform property exclusions--thanks for making me aware!

 

can i use this tool to find diffs between workspace version of an asset file and the version that exists on P4? e.g ProjectSettings.asset - what would be the P4V settings for that?

 

I read that page - it's talking about setting up a 3-way merge on P4. I'm asking about setting it up to do diffs (e.g. if I've made a local change, and I press Ctrl-D, I want to see what changed)

 

Hi, I'm getting the error 'Unmapped key when trying to reorder mapping keys', I've attached the scenes (base remote local) that cause the error. Any thoughts? I'm on linux.

 

I wonder if anyone could elaborate on the purpose of the "unity use ..." and "prefab use ..." lines within mergespecfile.txt when using git for source control?

When resolving a conflict, git creates temporary files, passing base, local and remote files as random.tmp; therefore the 'unity' and 'prefab' patterns are never matched.

It seems that, if trying to only use unityYamlMerge for .unity and .prefab conflicts when using git, it would be better to set up entries in .gitattributes to associate yamlMerge with these two file types?

 

@khris1rino Many thanks for the reply. I think, in a roundabout way, I just wanted to highlight and enquire about the limitation that the 'pretty' filenames passed to UnityYamlMerge from Git (which retain .unity/.prefab extensions) get lost when UnityYamlMerge generates temporaries for handoff to the fallback tool. As well as making it harder to understand what you're merging, this prevents the "unity use..." and "prefab use..." definitions in the mergespecfile ever being used. The best you can have is a match against .tmp or the catch-all "*"

It looks like this was on the original developer's radar a while back:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unityyamlmerge-a-few-annoying-thing.368512/

It'd be great if this could get resolved!

 

I'm getting the error "Couldn't locate merge tool to handle extension tmp in..." as well, when trying to use the merge tool (from SourceTree) on a .prefab file.

EDIT: If I add a fallback for "tmp" extension (in my case I added TortoiseMerge), it opens that tool with an empty merge...

 

There seems to be a problem with paths with spaces in them, when I ran "git mergetool" Smart Merge outputted a path that had spaces in it (and it was incomplete) and said "<partial filename> does not exist".

 

I'm using UnityYAMLMerge.exe with Git and SourceTree, and it seems working fine with simple test projects so far, but I'm not sure if I'm doing right.
I read the unity manual and couldn't find anything about '.gitattributes' but when googled about Smart Merge,
some said we need to put the below lines in .gitattributes.

*.unity binary
*.prefab binary
*.asset binary

Is this really necessary?
If so, could you explain why?

 

Finally clear answer from Unity!!
Thank you so much, now I know what to do

 

Hey Unity devs, when I type "git mergetool", I consistently get the following:

Normal merge conflict for 'Assets/Scenes/BlackBox.unity':
{local}: modified file
{remote}: modified file
Assets/Scenes/BlackBox.unity seems unchanged.
Was the merge successful [y/n]? n


We are creating a test case where both myself and another dev have committed changes, but the merge tool doesn't seem to find them. Any workaround for this? Scene merging is a nightmare for us..

 

I've been trying to get SmartMerge to work for a while now with no success using Windows 7. I keep getting the UnityYAMLMerge Error "Cannot find transform parent for fileID".

I opened up a project that I'm working on, changed the serialization to force text, set up UnityYAMLMerge as git's merge tool, created a very simple merge conflict on the main scene between two branches and attempted to merge them via "git mergetool" command. In the shell it reads

before displaying the mentioned error.

Would love to start using the mergetool so any assistance would be great!

 

Is this thread dead? My last question was in mid-May and I've never heard anything... I'll be sad if UnityYAMLMerge turns out to be abandonware, conceptually it has great promise.

 

Hope not, this needs to be part of the dev pipeline.

 

Does UnityYAMLMerge work with 4.x projects/files?

 

I'm having a similar issue.

 

On windows it just says the .unity file seems unchanged. On Mac however I see this output.

UnityYAMLMerge(66362,0x700006801000) malloc: *** mach_vm_map(size=2305843009213693952) failed (error code=3)
*** error: can't allocate region
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
UnityYAMLMerge(66362,0x70000677e000) malloc: *** mach_vm_map(size=2305843009213693952) failed (error code=3)
*** error: can't allocate region
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type std::bad_alloc: std::bad_alloc
libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type std::bad_alloc: std::bad_alloc
/usr/local/Cellar/git/2.13.0/libexec/git-core/git-mergetool--lib: line 128: 66362 Abort trap: 6 '/Applications/Unity/Unity.app/Contents/Tools/UnityYAMLMerge' merge -p $BASE $REMOTE $LOCAL $MERGED
<redacted my scene file name>.unity seems unchanged.

I'm using Unity 2017.4.0f1

 

Any chance of getting meld merge on the fallback defaults list?