[p4] perforce vs. subversion

[Ivey, William]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
> [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com]On Behalf Of 
> Weintraub, David
> 
> I was originally thinking about using a .p4ignore file (like a
> .cvsignore file), but then I realized that triggers run on the server
> and not the client. This means that the .p4ignore file wouldn't be
> available to the trigger.

It could be if you place the ignore file in Perforce. I have a number of
configuration and server-side scripts that I maintain just by submitting
new versions into a special section of the repository. These get updated
automatically by scripts running on the server. (One is a subscriber list
to our end-of-day change digest mailings. Users can add their IDs and
files paths of interest at will and the review script picks up the change
before it does anything with the list.)

Syncing them in the middle of a submit trigger might be more overhead
than you'd like, so if you could live with an update delay, you could
use a cron job to update the files every X minutes.

On the other hand, I don't see the advantage of a .p4ignore mechanism
over just adding the ignore lines to your client. Trying to block them
from submission is not as good as preventing them from being added to
a changelist in the first place. (The only minor advantage that comes
to mind is that you can make the file pattern check case-insensitive -
I wish exclusionary mappings had a switch for that. Then I wouldn't
have to use multiple lines to cover things like *.exe and *.EXE.)

-Wm