How do I avoid having to merge every file in our r

Question

We're having a bit of trouble following a TFS Baseless Merge. Here's a quick summary of the branches we have at the moment.

               Main
                |
           -----------
           |         |
        BranchA   BranchB
           |         |
        BranchA1  BranchB1

We performed a baseless merge using "All changes up to a specific version" from BranchA1 to BranchB1. When this was checked in every file in our source tree had a "merge" status.

This makes sense, and is explained in the ALM Rangers branching guide as follows:

If a baseless merge is performed with “All changes up to a specific version” selected, when checking in a baseless merge every file will have a merge status next to it since a baseless merge creates a branching relationship for every file in the parent folder.

What we have now is the need to Reverse Integrate BranchB1 into BranchB, but in doing so this means again we have every file with a "merge" status. And (from my testing) when we RI BranchB into Main we have the problem again. This isn't so much of an issue.

The problem will come following the RI merge of BranchB into Main, every FI merge from Main -> WhatEverBranch will have all the files with a "merge" status.

This is a big problem because we have some 120+ branches and some ~50,000 files in the repository.

Also, BranchB and BranchB1 will have more work in them and will be Reverse Integrated some more times. It would be a great inconvenience to just not check in the files with the "merge" status and then either a) ignore them on every RI merge thereafter, or b) stop using the branch after one RI merge.

• Is there any way we can make TFS forget about doing the "merge" status changes forever?
• Is there someway I can remove the relationship (re-parenting to "No Parent" then back to "BranchB" doesn't seen to work)?

I have tried a tf merge source dest /discard but that still has the "merge" statuses.