[p4] Linking support in the server

[Qazwart]

Subversion has the best way of handling this type of issue, and I'd  
sure wish Perforce would pick it up. In Subversion, you create an  
attribute on a directory that says it depends upon another directory.  
For example, you'd put the attribute on App0, App1, and App2 to say  
that they depend upon Common/Data. Then, when a developer checks out  
App0, Common/Data would also download, but as a read only directory.  
It was simple to find all shared dependencies, it encouraged  
developers to plan out their dependencies, and it was simple to  
maintain. Even better, it was easy to make the dependency depend upon  
a particular version of the shared directory. It was one of my  
favorite features of Subversion.

SafeSource, on the other hand, did this in the worst possible way. It  
shared individual files. If you added another file in a shared  
directory, you had to add it manually to all other shared instances.  
And, the shared file could be embedded right in someone else's  
project. Even worse, there was no way to easily tell if a file was  
shared between projects. Editing it in one place would suddenly  
change it in all the locations in your archive.

Perforce really doesn't have an automated way to handle this. The  
best way I've seen is to create integrations of the shared directory  
into the other projects:

$ p4 integ //Depot/Common/Data/... //Depot/App0/Data/...
$ p4 integ //Depot/Common/Data/... //Depot/App1/Data/...
$ p4 integ //Depot/Common/Data/... //Depot/App2/Data/...

You can then set the Protection table to prevent almost all users  
from editing the shared directory files. If files change in //Depot/ 
Common/Data, you could rerun the "p4 integ" command, and  
automatically update all the shares. Of course, using a branch  
definition would make it easy to track all the places where the  
directory is shared instead of running individual "p4 integ" commands  
on each application.


On Feb 12, 2007, at 1:05 PM, Jesus de Santos Garcia wrote:

> Hi,
>
> We have a scenario where we need to share some directories between
> several applications and want those shared directories under the
> application directory. For example:
>
> PERFORCE:
>
>   \Common\Data
>
>   \App0\
>   \App1\
>   \App2\
>
> VIEW IN THE CLIENT OF App0
> --------------------------
>
> C:\App0\Data
>
> VIEW IN THE CLIENT OF App1
> --------------------------
>
> C:\App1\Data
>
> VIEW IN THE CLIENT OF App0
> --------------------------
>
> C:\App1\Data
>
>
> At first, we tried with specific mapping in the client workspace to
> accomplish this. The problem appeared when an user works in several
> applications and cannot map a directory to several directories...
>
> How is the recommended way to solve this?
>
> In the past, I remember using links in SourceSafe to solve this. I've
> seen that p4 server support a type link, but it is supposed to work  
> only
> in linux (?). Are they supported in a Win32 server (using the links in
> NTFS with linkd for example).
>
> Thanks.
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