[p4] perforce-user Digest, Vol 23, Issue 9

[Krzysztof Kozminski]

What you're describing as allowing "inconsistent build that slipped  
past QA" does not deserve the designation of a "production environment".

With Perforce, creating a record of what went into the build, and  
verifying that what was in the build area is indeed what was  
recorded, is trivial:

	p4 files #have > manifest
	p4 diff -sd > unauthorized_deletions
	p4 diff -se > unauthorized_edits
	p4 opened > uncommited_changes

The first file will contain exact record of every version of every  
file in the build area, and the latter three should be empty to  
ensure the consistency. This is done *before* the build, so you don't  
even start building anything that might be inconsistent. Now you  
associate the manifest with the unique build ID, store it  
indefinitely, and all you need in the software is an appropriate  
embedding of the build ID.

The above is just a minor part of what goes into ensuring  
consistency, proper branching discipline being one of much more  
important contributing factors.

KK

On Nov 9, 2006, at 12:00 PM, perforce-user-request at perforce.com wrote:

> Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 13:54:21 -0600
> From: Mike <mikee at mikee.ath.cx>
> Subject: Re: [p4] RCS keywords
> To: "Weintraub, David" <david.weintraub at bofasecurities.com>
> Cc: perforce-user at perforce.com
> Message-ID: <20061109195421.GJ27968 at mikee.ath.cx>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> On Thu, 09 Nov 2006, Weintraub, David might have said:
>
> <snip>
>> It is interesting to see that modern version control systems like
>> Subversion and Peforce have keyword expansion off by default.  
>> ClearCase
>> doesn't even bother to implement this feature. Keyword expansion,  
>> like
>> "uucp" and "tip" are old Unix habits that have outlived their
>> usefulness.
>
> I disagree that keyword expansion has outlived its usefulness. In a
> development environment the use may be not as great as it once was.  
> However,
> in a production environment where I am diagnosing a problem that  
> may be
> related to an inconsistent build that slipped past QA, ident marks  
> in the
> code really help me know the code is built consistently.
>
> Mike