[p4] Using Changelists in Perforce

[Robert Cowham]

Well, I am all in favour of the new (still undoc'ed) revision spec labels,
which could then become pointers to particular changelists.

Apart from anything else, the new labels are pretty much instant to create
and are also automatically versioned if you use a spec depot.

Drawbacks are that there are a few bugs with their usage which is why I am
sure they are still undoc'ed (e.g. diff2 usage, and the fact that the p4
labels <file> output doesn't include these new labels).

Another thing is that I am not sure if perfmerge2.pl which does the merge of
meta data actually updates the labels - but this would no doubt be part of
what is needed for them to be doc'ed so solvable.

Robert

> -----Original Message-----
> From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com 
> [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of 
> Weintraub, David
> Sent: 28 June 2006 16:07
> To: perforce-user at perforce.com
> Subject: [p4] Using Changelists in Perforce
> 
> As I stated previously, I am much more familiar with the 
> operations of CVS and ClearCase which don't have a concept of 
> changelists. In those packages, you use labels to mark your 
> development. As I can imagine, using changelists means I 
> don't have to label each and every build that I do since I 
> can refer to them by their changelist number.
>  
> However, how important are changelists -- let's say a week or 
> a month after they were generated? It's like Dave Barry's 
> comment that getting around on the New York Subway is easy 
> because all of the lines are named after famous letters and 
> numbers. In this case, all of the builds are "labeled" with 
> meaningless numbers. It's one thing to say, Changelist
> 10,302 is the most recent build. But what about Changelist 
> 10,102 that I gave to QA last week? What if QA wants another 
> build based off of that?
>  
> That means that my current build based upon the head of my 
> trunk may be Changelist 10,302, and QA's build that is 
> branched off of Changelist
> 10,102 is now called Changelist 10,309, and if another build 
> is done on the head of development, it might be Changelist 
> 10,312. What if I'm not only doing development on FOO-3.3, 
> but also some development on FOO-3.2?
> What about the group working on BAR-1.2? It would seem that 
> depending upon changelists would make things more complex 
> since all of the changelist numbers would be mingled in with 
> one another. There would be no relationship between the 
> changelist number and what you're working on.
>  
> So, when do you go with labels? Do you label a build based 
> upon a changelist if you hand it off to QA? Do you label 
> branch builds, but depend upon changelists for regular 
> builds? What about multiple projects that use the same 
> server? Or, do people simply get use to remembering various 
> changelist numbers, and you only do labels when something is 
> actually released?
>  
> I know that labeling can be time consuming too, but if 
> labeling could be done instantaneously, would you label more 
> of the builds? Or, once you get use to the concept of 
> changelists, you would no longer refer to labels even if you could?
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