[p4] usefulness of a depot other than a top-level directory?

[Ivey, William]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
> [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com]On Behalf Of
> Tim.Miller at reardencommerce.com
> 
> To keep pathnames short, I would like to create depots like this
> (below).  Is this a good idea?  A bad idea?  Pitfalls?

I'll take the middle ground on this one. When I first set up
Perforce I asked support if there were any gotchas when using
multiple depots and they said no, not really.

So far the only problems I've encountered are with certain
operations using p4win. Most notably, the integrate a
submitted changelist feature. If the change spans two or more
depots, it doesn't work because it creates the destination by
looking for a common path and there isn't one.

Having files from two depots in a single changelist is pretty
rare, though, and it's easy enough to work around it, so I don't
see it as a big issue.

Anyway, our layout has depots for specific purposes: //qa, //docs,
//bld (build), //tools, //users, and, the most popular one, //dev
(which is where 90% of all activity happens).

The idea was to make it simple to assign rights by types of tasks
as well as making it easy to split things across filesystems if
we wanted.

As far as keeping paths short, I'm a big fan of that, but most
people interact with Perforce using either a GUI or local paths
(which can be kept short by view mapping) so saving a few
characters isn't something I worried about. -Wm