title: Prevent change propagation for single files
body: <p>I work with Perforce streams, following the <a href="http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/p4v/streams_overview.html" rel="nofollow">suggested mainline model</a> (release, mainline and development streams). In addition, we use a odd/even release version numbering (similar to linux kernel) with odd minor version numbers for development versions, even minor numbers for release versions.</p>
  
  <p>After fixing a bug in a release stream, I need to update several files with version information to create a new release version/installer. These version changes <em>must not</em> be merged to mainline (only the bugfix itself), because the version of the mainline has been already increased to the next development version. </p>
  
  <p>Now, when merging from the release stream to main, I get conflicts for all files containing version information. Currently, I need to manually resolve all conflicts, undoing the version number change (keeping the development version).</p>
  
  <p>Example: </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Release stream started with version 2.4.0 (stable/release version number)</li>
  <li>Increase mainline version to 2.5 (next development version)</li>
  <li>Fix bug in release stream, increase version number to 2.4.1</li>
  <li>Merge changes to mainline: accept bugfix, manually undo conflicts in version files</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Is there a way to exclude single files / a set of files from integration so that I don't have to go through this tedious (and potentially error-prone) manual process? (NB: The version information is separate from the code.)</p>