[p4] User initiated Codeline Freezes

[Jeff A. Bowles]

On 8/26/07, Roy Smith <smith_roy at emc.com> wrote:
"What is the advantage of doing this compared to just branching at the
deadline?"

It's sort of nice to stop-the-chaos (if it is, indeed, that rapid) to pause
and verify that the dev tree is self-consistent before declaring the thing's
ready to start down a release-branch path.

It's really about your confidence in the quality of the stability of the main
development tree. If you do continuous or frequent build/smoke-tests (at
least once-a-day), you have a higher confidence than if it's broken/unbuildable
most of the time.

In classes, I teach "freezing a dev codeline/tree should be considered
a four-letter-word in Perforce." (It's catchy, and easy to remember.)
The reality is that a very-short moment during a release cycle is probably
reasonable. Your process has to serve your needs, ultimately,
so you decide.

    -Jeff Bowles