[p4] p4tar/p4untar

[Jeff Grills]

Argh.  Somehow I sent that before I finished it.  Sorry.

Perforce provides an API, but it's to communicate with the server, not to
plug into the graphical clients.  I've used that API a couple of times, and
it's certainly reasonable.

One of my unfinished projects (using that API) was to monitor a directory
tree for changes and then automatically reflect those changes to the
perforce server.  Basically, you could sync a writable copy of the files in
perforce, edit, add, and delete at will, and the tool would automatically
maintain a changelist of what you had done.  I had a functional
proof-of-concept, but never tried to get it to production quality.  I
imagined such a tool would be very useful for non-technical users of
perforce (artists, managers, and such).  It's in my public depot folder
under PerforceClientService if anyone would like to contribute to the
project or finish it.

j

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Grills [mailto:jgrills at drivensnow.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 3:00 PM
To: 'Nikhil Singhal'
Cc: 'perforce-user at perforce.com'
Subject: RE: [p4] p4tar/p4untar


Perforce provides an API, but it's to communicate with the

-----Original Message-----
From: Nikhil Singhal [mailto:nikhil at telspace.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 10:49 AM
To: 'Jeff Grills'
Cc: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: RE: [p4] p4tar/p4untar


That would be just cool. Does perforce provide an API set?

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Grills [mailto:jgrills at drivensnow.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 8:40 AM
To: 'Nikhil Singhal'
Cc: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: RE: [p4] p4tar/p4untar

Oh, I didn't take your post as a gripe at all.  I'm glad that you, and many
others it seems, have benefited from these utilities.  I believe software
should be obvious, easy to use, and (when possible) hard to misuse.  The
dependencies that p4tar/p4untar have on external utilities that aren't
commonly installed on Windows platforms make those tools much harder to use
on Windows than I'd like, and I fully understand that Windows is a very
popular development and deployment platform.  I've developed on and shipped
several commercial products for Windows over the past 12 years.  

My solicitation for replacement ideas was motivated only by a desire to
improve these utilities for everyone, myself included.  And my request still
stands - if anyone has ideas, I'd really like to hear them.

And if support is listening (and of course they are), I wouldn't mind at all
if this functionality made its way into p4/p4win/p4v as a native perforce
capability and these utilities became obsolete.  I'd love to be able to
right-click a changelist in one of the GUI clients and select a menu entry
for "Archive changelist to file."  Wouldn't that be useful?

j

-----Original Message-----
From: Nikhil Singhal [mailto:nikhil at telspace.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 11:25 PM
To: 'Jeff Grills'; 'Stephen Vance'
Cc: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: RE: [p4] p4tar/p4untar


Jeff,
Don't get me wrong. They are GREAT tools. It's just that I did not have
these utilities installed. I changed the code locally to use windiff
(instead of diff) and now this is up and running.

Thanks for writing these lovely utilities.
Nikhil

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Grills [mailto:jgrills at drivensnow.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 8:03 PM
To: 'Nikhil Singhal'; 'Stephen Vance'
Cc: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: RE: [p4] p4tar/p4untar


I (the author of these tools) use them on both UNIX and windows all the
time.  In fact, multiplatform development was one of the primary reasons I
wrote these tools - I needed to compile and test my changes on multiple
platforms before submitting them to our source tree.  I use the cygwin suite
of tools (http://www.cygwin.com) to make them run under Windows (although I
use ActiveState perl instead of Cygwin's).  One could create a very stripped
down set of files from cygwin to make p4tar/p4untar work so that the entire
toolkit need not be installed.

I'd certainly take recommendations for replacements for these components of
the p4tar/p4untar tools, but they'd need to be more widely available than
what is there now.  My primary programming language isn't perl - I just use
it as a convenient cross-platform scripting language.  Perhaps perl has
something built in these days that would do the job, but I just don't know
about it.  If so, and someone pointed me in the right direction, I'm sure I
could figure it out and make these tools more portable.  I do like being
able to take apart a p4tar archive by hand and extract the bits I need, but
I'd sacrifice that for ease of use of the tools for Windows if necessary.

j

-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
[mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Nikhil Singhal
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 8:03 PM
To: 'Stephen Vance'
Cc: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: Re: [p4] p4tar/p4untar


Both these scripts assume UNIX platform (for example, tar, uname, diff). is
there a Windows version of these?