Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Tony Smith <tony AT smee.org>]

Some collated comments on the Perforce discussion that raged last week while 
I 
was on vacation:

On Wednesday 10 September 2003 11:29 pm, Sergey A. Lipnevich wrote:
> I discovered that it doesn't work with perforce-client spell version
> 2003.1.46260 but does work with 2002.2.41105. By works/not works I mean
> ability to do "sync" and "commit" commands. They've probably downgraded
> the server... Did you downgrade the server, Tony? Where art thou,
> brother, when we needeth you so :-)?

Sorry Sergey, an ill-timed vacation. The 2002.2/2003.1 thing was a 
red-herring 
though. The problem was very much server-side.

On Friday 12 September 2003 8:56 pm, Ladislav Hagara wrote:
> Personally I would gladly accept two synchronised Perforce servers,
> located on different continents and managed by different admins.
> I am aware that some developers prefer CVS.

Sorry, it's barely possible to do that. You'd need bi-directional replication 
to make it practical and that's a very complex problem with an equally 
complex solution. Personally I don't think it's worth the effort, but see 
below.

On Friday 12 September 2003 10:08 pm, Andrew wrote:
> I just thought id point out that perforce has a cvs2p4 package on their
> site. It looks tricky to make it do incremental updates, but possible,
> maybe we can use it as a head start?

cvs2p4 is a conversion tool, and it's one-way only. VCP on the other hand can 
allegedly be used to keep a Perforce and CVS server in sync. It's still at an 
alpha stage in its development, but Barrie Slaymaker (the author) says it 
works.

I plan to set this up, but I'm still waiting for access to the mythical CVS 
server.

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 11:26, Arwed von Merkatz wrote:
> (when the server works, hope that Tony gets it stable again)

I hope so too.

On Saturday 13 September 2003 4:15 am, Hamish Greig wrote:
> the same problem would potentially exist with whatever solution we use IF
> there is no backup server.
> Is it possible to have a second "slave" p4 server ?

It's technically possible through quite complex methods (live replication of 
the journal file, and automated syncing through a Perforce proxy to propagate 
copies of the file versions), but the issue is not replicating the data out, 
but replicating the local changes back again after the problem is resolved.

> Is this allowed by the license we have ?

Yes, but you'd need to apply for a Duplicate License (free of charge)

On Saturday 13 September 2003 12:16 pm,  Jimmy Yen wrote:
> I'm inclined to think that anon cvs/p4 access would be sufficient. Not
> every microscopic change interests me, but I'm pretty biased...;)

I agree, but you can have a mailing list if you want one. It'd be very easy 
for me to adapt the review daemon we're currently using so that instead of 
emailing change notifications to interested Perforce users, it emails them to 
a mailing list instead. Then you just subscribe/unsubscribe as wanted.

The biggest issue here is that it would our maintainers to be more 
descriptive 
in their commenting of the changes.  Descriptions like "<integrate>" have 
appeared recently, and that's no help to anyone. 

It would be easy enough to write a script that integrates changes (from devel 
to test say) one by one and reproduces the exact change description from 
devel when it's propagated on to test. It would involve more work for the 
test/stable maintainers.

> BTW, if the license even allows that is still an unanswered question.

The license does not allow anonymous access as such, but there's nothing to 
stop you creating a user called "anonymous" with no password and granting 
them read-only access.  

On Sunday 14 September 2003 4:03 am, Eric Sandall wrote:
> I like this idea, that way there's a more visible representation (more
> visible than a list you have to subscribe to, and check) of what's going
> on.  A script would be much more preferred than e-mailing the changes
> (especially since I am supposed to compile all the changes into one big,
> easy-to-read message ;), which I've been negligent in, even more so than
> our developers).
>
> There is currently a script in //sgl/scripts/ (in Perforce) which allow
> creating reports for your changes, along with instructions (written by moi
> ;)) on how to use them (integ.rb and report.rb, IIRC), but they don't have
> as much detail as we're looking for (they just list spells were added,
> changed, and removed, but nothing more specific than that (i.e. versions
> changed, specific files, etc.)).

Some tips for you:

1. P4Ruby is at:

 http://public.perforce.com/guest/tony_smith/perforce/API/Ruby/index.html

To build it you'll need the Perforce API from:

http://www.perforce.com/downloads/perforce/r03.1/bin.linux80x86/p4api.tar

2. The command for listing changes to a branch is "p4 changes". Use "p4 
changes -l" to get the long description.

Tony