[p4] perforce vs. subversion

[Sweeney, Tony]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com [mailto:perforce-user-
> bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Robert Cowham
> Sent: 03 May 2006 22:53
> To: 'Sam Roberts'; perforce-user at perforce.com
> Subject: Re: [p4] perforce vs. subversion
> > Also, the "p4 submit" commmand (unlike svn) doesn't allow
> > multiple arguments. So if you have changes in src/ and doc/,
> > but don't want to submit changes in conf/, you have to do a
> > "p4 submit ...", then manually weed out the conf/ files. With
> > svn, I would do "svn submit src doc".
> 
> I've never been sure why submit from command line only takes one
argument.

It didn't use to take _any_ filename arguments.  I personally requested
this feature in 1997.  I specifically asked for the ability to 'p4
submit <filename>' as a convenience for just submitting a single file,
and it was duly added.  As I recall, however, there was a server bug
which was tickled if you tried to pass multiple arguments to 'p4 submit'
on the command line, so Perforce "fixed" it by explicitly limiting
submit to one argument.  From the 97.3 release notes:

	Selectively Submitting Files -- #3763 **
	    'p4 submit' can now take a (single) file pattern as an
	    argument.  If present, this restricts the files being
submitted
	    to those in the default change that match the pattern.

I think the previous version was missing was missing the '(single)'
caveat, and contained the bug.  Prior to that, you always got the entire
changelist in the submit dialog and any parameters were simply ignored.

And, yes, it would be nice if they fixed this properly.  In my opinion,
'p4 submit' should compute a relational restriction/join of the
changelist filenames and the command line arguments, exactly like Sam is
expecting it to.  For some reason Perforce didn't see fit to implement
this back in the day.

Tony.