[p4] Automatic Syncs w/ Production Directories

[Shiv Sikand]

David,

The IC Manage Perforce Sync Engine is a high performance, scalable
system for performing change based, automatic synchronisation.

It is probably overkill for your single machine requirement, but
nonetheless,  you can download a PDF here:

ftp://ftp.icmanage.com/pub/outgoing/PSE.pdf

Cheers,
Shiv



> Message: 7
> Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 09:34:02 -0400
> From: "Weintraub, David" <david.weintraub at bofasecurities.com>
> Subject: [p4] Automatic Syncs w/ Production Directories
> To: perforce-user at perforce.com
> Message-ID:
> 	<E7F4E682EA373D4BA84B7F34C96DC5A901E82B67 at ex2k.bankofamerica.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> 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 
>
>