[p4] Usefulness of "file spec" integrations

[Ivey, William]

We had a similar situation, although it was complicated by
an intermediate reorganization on the main branch.

You can do it with file spec integrations, but you end up
generating most of what a branch spec would need anyway.
That is, you would create a script with a series of
integrations from new to old paths relative to the respective
branches. You might as well take the arguments and turn them
into a branchspec and be done.

I wrote a script that matched up files in one branch with
files in the other. That got me files that had just changed
position but were still named the same. It also generated a
list of files it couldn't match, or which matched more than
once, so I could work out those cases manually.

A more intelligent script would look at file histories and
actually trace back to the point where things changed and
build the mapping from there. It would be able to handle
file name changes as easily as path changes. That's something
I keep meaning to write... Someone else may have done it by
now.

-Wm


-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Brian Topping

Greetings,

I'm hoping someone here can explain the relative benefits of file spec
versus branch spec integrations.  It's pretty clear what the latter does
with the ability to do single-click resolves between two branches, but it's
less clear how to do the same thing with file spec integrations.  And if
they aren't possible, what file spec integrations are good for at all.

Here is my scenario:  We have a Java source tree with approximately 20K
files that needs major reorganizations to work properly in Ant.  The major
moves to the source tree were initially made with a branch spec, but this
proved too unwieldy with thousands of files that needed to be moved.  Moving
forward, a few dozen file spec integrations were done via an IDE.  The new
source tree is working, and now we need to resolve changes that were made in
the original source tree during that time to the new source tree.

One or two people on the internets have said that this is possible, but the
only way I can see to resolve files across a file spec integration is to do
them one by one. 

Certainly there must be a way to salvage three months of work that went in
to creating this new source tree with file spec integrations.  Ideally, this
would be possible with some black magic command-line incantation that
resolves the two branches (regardless of how a particular file was
integrated), but in the worst case, maybe there is some kind of report that
can be dumped for a branch that generates a branch spec integration.  (The
latter should be possible, all the integration information is in the
changelist logs.)

Thanks kindly for any information,

Brian Topping





Brian Topping Platform Engineering
btopping <mailto:vmorris at northstar.com> @northstar.com P 415.344.6164 M
415.577.6444 F 415.344.6150
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