[p4] Concept of file ownership

[steve at vance.com]

See below.

Steve

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Calman, Kevin Kevin.Calman at acs-inc.com
Date: 	Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:35:36 -0500
To: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: Re: [p4] Concept of file ownership


On Monday, August 11, 2008, Stephen Vance wrote,

| By 'owner' I assume you mean managerial or administrative 
| responsibility. I'd be interested to hear what abilities and 
| responsibilities you associate with this 'ownership'.
	I am thinking more like team or design lead responsibility. In the
context of peer code review, the person who would be required reviewer or
moderator. In the context of problem determination, the "go-to-guy" for
treating emergency production issues. In the context of future design
activity, the person who "owns" the architecture of the module of which any
given file is a part.

== Dan's feedback plays well with this. Establish a group with write
permission to that area. By convention establish that the first person in
the group list is the group leader to handle your ownership metadata. Make
that person an 'admin' over that directory tree in the protection table.
Give everyone outside of that group read or no permissions. Use the undoc
'=branch' as an exclusionary protection to prevent people from making
unauthorized copies of the tree.

| As for adding an explicit marker of ownership, you could add 
| an attribute (undoc but used by Perforce for production 
| functionality) on the first revision indicating the owner. 
	This is what I was looking for, I'll check it out.

== For the group as I indicate above will be more efficient storage-wise
and will not require undoc functionality.

| I'm also curious which systems you've seen implement 
| ownership. Although some I've seen use the term 'owner', they 
| are pretty much equivalent to Perforce's use of 'user' except 
| where they use file system permissions to do what Perforce 
| does with the protection table. Out of the box, I can't think 
| of one that has both concepts.
	One specifically that I am thinking of would be IBM's
Orbit/CMVC/TeamConnection product, where every file had permissions similar
to a Unix file system: a defined owner and group.

==Interesting. I haven't played with that one. ClearCase does something
similar but I considered it a weak form of ownership.

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