Useless Perforce Error

In my work existence, I support the Perforce Source Code Management (SCM) tool. Occasionally, I find examples of error messages in Perforce that tell you nothing about what is wrong. I will try to enumerate those here as I find them.

• must sync before integrating — One occasion that this message shows up, is when the user is attempting to branch a file, but both the source and destination depot locations are mapped by the client spec to the same client location. This creates a name collision, hence the error. Obviously, this can only happen in a client spec using plus mappings. The solution is to either temporarily remove one of the mappings, or to have a reserved "branching" client spec sitting around that you use just for these kinds of occasions. The branching client would contain a single mapping //depot/... //client/... and be free from collision issues.