[p4] Running Obliterate command on perforce server live databases

[Robert Cowham]

> IMHO, the danger of running obliterate is that you are 
> subverting the purpose of using an SCM system in the first 
> place.  The point is to keep your development history.  You 
> would be surprised how often developers look back through old 
> code to see how it evolved over time.  Just because some 
> subset of people consider a branch temporary or obsolete 
> doesn't mean everyone does.
> 
> I would seriously look at why you think you need to 
> obliterate branches and perhaps use one of the many other 
> Perforce solutions to simply "hide" them.  One of the most 
> common business drivers I hear to use obliterate is to save 
> disk space.  But the reality is that use of obliterate is 
> more likely to increase the disk footprint of your depot than 
> to reduce it.

I agree with the above - history is useful, and typically most important
immediately after it is gone for good!

An interesting obliterate option for one client was to reduce the metadata
load of branches of 30k files. They had lots of such branches due to their
process, but we worked out the few simple commands to identify the say 200
files that might have actually changed on a typical one of these branches,
and leave these, obliterating the rest. Rather like retro-creating sparse
branches.

Robert