[p4] Accidental checkout

[Weintraub, David]

Are they sync'ing to all files on the server, or are they marking all
files for "edit" and then checking them all in? Guess if they're using
the Cntl-E hotkey, they're probably doing the latter. Massive checkins
will cause problems with other users checking in since checking in is a
synchronous operation: Only one user at a time can do a check in.
(Otherwise, how would atomic checkins and changelists work?).

There are a few solutions to this issue:

* Train your users to revert all unchanged files before checking in.

* Have users set up views that don't display the contents of the entire
depot. Only the parts they're working on. That way, they can't possibly
select all the files in your depot. Even if they checkout every single
file in that view, it wouldn't take long for Perforce to check in a
hundred or so files. It's when they checkout every file of every branch
and you're talking about 20,000 or more files that Perforce will bog
down.

* Implement a trigger that will prevent a checkin if some arbitrarily
high number of files (say 250 or 500 files) are in a single changelist.
Unless someone is doing some major reconstruction of the archive, or
checking a very large project for the first time into Perforce, nobody
should be checking in that many files at once. If they do need to check
in that many files, you could setup the trigger to read a permission
file to allow users in that file to do checkins. Or, they can divide up
their changelists into smaller portions. Or maybe just implement the
trigger on those who "tend" to do these massive checkins.

I wonder how "accidental" this may be. I can imagine someone checking
out all the files, so they don't have to check out individual files
every time they want to edit one. When you submit, P4V displays the
changelist and *ALL* the files on the changelist. Certainly, that must
of clued them in that something wasn't right.

-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
[mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Jeff Desharnais
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2006 5:13 PM
To: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: [p4] Accidental checkout


Hello,

We have had a few people here who have accidentally checked out an
entire depot or root folder in Perforce and claim that they didn't do
it, but rather it "just happened".

The only thing I can think of is that all three of these people are
actively using Photoshop and CTRL-E is a hotkey they use very
frequently, which also happens to be the hotkey to check out files in
the Perforce clients. P4V also gives no warning for this, whereas P4Win
does... But they are using P4V.

These three people are convinced that they had nothing to do with it,
but my only answers for them are that they accidentally hit CTRL-E or
perhaps selected multiple files by holding CTRL and they forgot to
unselect the root level.

This causes major problems for our development team because they are
forced to wait a very long time while every file is reverted.

Have any of you ever come across this problem before or have any insight
to this?

Thanks,

---------------------
Jeff Desharnais
IT Specialist
Mad Doc Software
100 Burtt Rd., Suite 220
Andover, MA  01810
(978) 409-6272 Ext. 132

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