[p4] Workspace option: exclusive open

[Greg Whitfield]

When your user opens a file for edit, he can then lock it. This will
prevent anyone else from submitting a change - note it does not prevent
them from checking it out. I know you mentioned locking, but if your
concern is to prevent unwanted changes in the depot then locking works.

Personally I prefer locking over exclusive checkouts. It's really
annoying if you can't make that vital test hack in a file because John
is on holiday or ill.

It's a shame there is no "open" trigger. But I guess that could be
complicated when opening multiple files in one operation.

On a more general point, I always encourage the use of separate client
specs for different branches. Don't worry about disk space - it is so
cheap it costs you more to think about than to buy!

The main "expense" in having the codelines separately synced is in
setting up your build & execution environment so you can have multiple
branches co-resident on a single machine without lots of environment
changes. But this is general good practice anyway.

Greg
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-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
[mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Ildefonzo
Arocha
Sent: 14 September 2007 12:48
To: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: [p4] Workspace option: exclusive open

Hi List,

It is Friday and my brain has already started to shutdown :-)

I am about to submit an enhancement request to Perforce, just wanted to
double check with the gurus and hear what you guys have to say.

What I am needing is an workspace option where, every file checked out
is locked by the user, so that no other user can change the file.
Typemap'ping the branch will not help as this only works with new files
and not with files that are integrated.

To make a long story short, the reason why I need this:

We develop centrally (RDP/Citrix and Linux), we have a main codeline, a
branch for each version (V1,V2,V3), and each user has its own workspace
which consists of the main codeline.

Now and then, we have to fix bugs in V1, V2 or V3, this happens
frequently.  In such case we fix in MAIN and propagate to V1,V2 or V3
(sometimes vice versa).  In order to do this we need a workspace for
V1,V2 and V3, however mapping these branches to each users workspace
would be a big overkill (plus a big waste of disk space).  So what I
would need is to create one workspace for each branch, and this new
option "exclusive open" which allows only one user to open a file at the
time.

Locking the file does not seem help, as this is only checked at submit
time.

Does this make sense to anyone? Hope it does :-)

Thanks,
Ildefonzo
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