[p4] What is a Shelf

[Bennett, Patrick]

You mean besides the horrendously ugly depot and branching history it
would create over time?

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Cowham [mailto:robert at vaccaperna.co.uk] 
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2007 2:01 PM
To: Bennett, Patrick; 'Rich Ireland'; perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: RE: [p4] What is a Shelf

A sparse branch per shelf with a suitable naming convention (e.g.
include
changelist no or date/time), doesn't seem a huge overhead to me...

Robert

> -----Original Message-----
> From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com 
> [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of 
> Bennett, Patrick
> Sent: 17 May 2007 17:44
> To: Rich Ireland; perforce-user at perforce.com
> Subject: Re: [p4] What is a Shelf
> 
> No, frequently it's when you have code you're currently 
> working on (a change that will take some time to implement, 
> lots of files open...) that you need to 'get out of the way' 
> for a brief period of time so that you can make a quick fix 
> to the existing branch.  You would just shelve that open 
> changelist (thus reverting those open changes - but your 
> changes are preserved in the shelf), edit/submit the files 
> you need for the hotfix, then unshelve the prior changes.  I 
> wrote scripts to kind of do the same thing with private 
> branches, but branches cause a lot of problems because 
> they're permanent and get in the way when the same branch is 
> used over long periods of time for these 'temp' actions.  A 
> shelf type of system needs to persist the shelf-state, but 
> once something is unshelved, no history is necessary (or desired).