What are some ways to handle the branching/merging of auto-generated files

We're using TFS but I believe this question exists with any source control system. Basically, we branch our main stream into seperate streams devided by project. As streams are deemed stable they are merged back into the main stream. However there are some auto-generated files that make this merging process very difficult and error prone. Some examples are:

1. Solution f开发者_开发知识库iles (.sln)
2. Project files
3. merged modules
4. Reporting Server files (.rdl)
5. Auto-generated XML files of all types
6. Etc.

In these cases the auto-generation is not always predictable in that the sequence of test in the files change everytime you make a change. This makes it very hard to merge.

How can these be handled?

Thanks

There are a lot of ways to handle more difficult merging paths. You can exclude certain files from a merge of course but to answer this question directly: you will have to merge them everytime.

Take a proj file for instance. If you add a reference, that reference will need to make its way to the main branch somehow. Sure, sometimes developers download SPs which can force a proj file to get revved and you don't want that getting pushed up to main but it comes down to the person doing the merge to be smart enough to catch these things and also to the developer to be aware of what they are attempting to merge up.

Merging is difficult and will always be difficult :/