[p4] Emulate ClearCase (Web based development)

[Robert Cowham]

> I really like this solution -  and I've been playing with the 
>  the P4CONFIG variable to automatically determine which 
> branch I'm working on based on the directory I'm in. And if I 
> cant go this way now - I'm definitely going to push our team 
> to adopt this method in the future. But the issue with this 
> right now is that for every change we wish to test on the 
> web-server - we need to check-in the file. This tends to get 
> tedious - especially since GUI (css/html) related changes are 
> always small and many. Ideally, we would be testing those 
> minor things on our local boxes, and have the setup you 
> mentioned for QA to have the current checked-in versions of files.

If I were you I'd push really hard for your team to have multiple test
environments, i.e. 1 per development machine. Given that you are web based,
it is surely not difficult to replicate most if not all of the dev
environment to individual developer boxes? Are you running Apache or IIS or
what?

I have seen many shops over the years with just one or two shared
development environments and when they switch their lives tend to become
much easier. It is often just inertia as to why things are being done this
way (they don't realise there is a better way). Sometimes licenses for a
particular application make things a bit expensive, but there are usually
work arounds for this.

Robert