[p4] Mapping between changesets

[Weintraub, David]

I wonder if the Spec depot keeps the old changelist numbers that get
renumbered. He should at least be able to sync back to the day before he
submitted the changelist, and find the old changelist number he was
working on.

-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
[mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of G Barthelemy
Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2006 7:33 PM
To: David Ferguson
Cc: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: Re: [p4] Mapping between changesets

On 9/5/06, David Ferguson <daf at vmware.com> wrote:
> I've got a user who wants a mapping between the changeset number that 
> he manipulated for weeks, and the changeset number it became at submit

> time.  Is there any way to do this other than a post-submit trigger 
> that keeps track in a table somewhere?

I don't see how you could avoid using a trigger, but there are
alternatives to using a "table somewhere" (and I guess that the external
table is what you really want to avoid ?). The alternative would be of
course to embed the existing changelist number into metadata, somewhere.
The aim is to be able to query and find the relation between old change
and new change number. What springs to mind is jobs, as their relation
with changelists is easily queried.

Some quick suggestions:

1- maybe you already enforce the association of jobs with changelists
upon submission (say because Perforce at your shop is tied to a defect
tracking system by using jobs). In this case, why not mofify the
jobspec, add a "original-changelist" field which would be filled in
automatically by a form-out trigger on submit, using p4 fixes (I assume
here that the new changelist number hasn't taken the place of the old
one at that point: that needs to be verified).

2- a variation would be to automatically produce a "pseudo" job for each
change that is created (with a form trigger), with a name like
OC-98765 (98765 being the current changelist number) and that would be
associated with the changelist itself. When your changelist gets finaly
submited and changes number, that same job (with the old
number) goes with it.

What this is crying out for is the possibility of using custom fields in
the change spec ! There is that undocumented p4 spec <type>
command: it doesn't do much yet, but maybe this is an indication that
this will be coming in a future version ?

Well then, here's another one: have a form-out trigger on submit that
would automatically fill in a comment line in the submit form ("this was
changelist 98765"), with that comment line tagged or formatted in such a
way that it is machine parsable.

--
Guillaume
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