[p4] Exploding diskspace - soft linking a workspace?

[Noel Yap]

Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:

> Noel Yap writes:
> 
>> IME, whenever I've seen people try to come up with solutions to 
>> decrease disk space usage, they've usually not done a cost analysis of 
>> the time it'll take to set up such a system and the time it takes to 
>> manage such a system versus the cost of disk space itself and whatever 
>> management overhead that entails.  At about 1USD/GiB, it's usually 
>> cheaper to just buy more disk.  YMMV.
> 
> That's the price for disk only, right? Or do you get a decent backup 
> system for that price as well?

I'm not a sysadmin so I don't know much about the cost of backup systems, but I would hazzard a guess that it can't be more than 1USD/GiB for the backup storage.  Considering compression and incremental backups, I would imagine that that extra 1USD/GiB 
would cover the software as well but don't quote me on any of this.

OTOH, how much are developers paid?  And how often will they run into unbuildable workspaces due to stuff in the common area?  Note that the common area by itself may be perfectly OK, but in combination with the developer's workspace, it's not.  Now factor 
in how much time it'll take each developer to hunt down the problem and fix it.

This is the reason I avoided using dynamic views out of the box in ClearCase.  My philosophy is that developers need to control when changes are made in their environments either by making the changes themselves, pulling them in from the repository, or 
modifying some build configuration to point to newer project releases (an exception may be made for this last part when it comes to patches).

HTH,
Noel