[p4] A few questions about perforce and a specific branching strategy

[William Deegan]

Greetings,

My client has decided on the following branching strategy.

Two branches:
main     - ongoing development
release - release branch for customers.

1) Once a week they will merge the contents of main to release, overwriting
all files on release.
2) They will stabilize the code in the release branch, and then label
and release to customer.
3) The will then merge put a label on release, and merge all the changes down
to main.
4) Repeat

Note that the merge down to main will likely be happening throughout
the week, but a final merge down will happen before the merge the
contents of main up into
release overwriting all the contents of release.

They are concerned about two things:
1) The impact on the size of perforce database of the above strategy
2) How well will perforce handle the merging up and down.
3) Any specific gotchas to watch out for and/or specific command usage
to achieve the above.

I've discussed with them the wisdom of the above strategy and they
will not be deterred, so lets not discuss that.

Thanks,
Bill