[p4] Automatic Syncs w/ Production Directories

[Weintraub, David]

I've got an interesting question...
 
We have an account called "merbld" that is the owner of the Perforce
server, runs our triggers, and also is used for universal scripts and
executables that we use in the Unix environment. I've setup most of
merbld's directories to be Perforce clients. The merbld user has no
write permission on the Perforce depot, but does have read permission.
 
Users update the script or binary under merbld's control in their own
views (so we know who made the change), and then are suppose to go to
merbld's account and do a sync on the affected directories. What I'd
like to do is to automate this procedure -- when a change is submitted
that affects the merbld account, the correct merbld client is
automatically sync'd to get the latest changes. A way of automatically
deploying the changes.
 
In fact, I could imagine this type of mechanism being used for
automatically deploying production directories. Right now, it is too
easy to go to the directory and make changes manually. We have no
version history of the change and may not even know who made the change.
An automated update system would make it much more likely that
production people make their changes in Perforce, so we have a history
of the changes.
 
I am thinking to somehow use our review trigger to accomplish this task.
If the review daemon determines that one of the directories it is
watching has changed, it will automatically sync the correct production
directory. When I used ClearCase, we used what were called exported
dynamic views. In ClearCase, a view is equivalent to a Perforce client.
However, unlike Perforce clients, dynamic views were constantly sync'd
with the latest changes. Exporting a view allowed you to treat it as an
NFS mount point. When I was using Subversion, there was a lot of chatter
on their mailing list about setting up automatic "exports" of Subversion
files into production directories.
 
So, has anyone ever done anything like this in Perforce? If so, how did
you accomplish it? Is this a feature that others would fine handy to
have in Perforce? And, would this be a feature that should be built into
Perforce and other version control systems 

 

--

David Weintraub

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