[p4] How do YOU identify the code set for a release?

[Lloyd Cha]

Hi Jeff -

I've been thinking about this a bit more and wondered if you could
detail what you mean by "less wear-and-tear" on the server.

When sync-ing to a "release" the current method in use here
essentially collects the list of files and versions required and
issues something like this:

  p4 sync file1#v1 file2#v2 file3#v3 [...]

as one sync command.  Presumably with labels this could change to:

  p4 sync @label1

It's certainly more convenient to use the label from the command-line
point of view, and requires fewer bytes of information to be sent from
the client to the server.  However, it then requires the server to
lookup information from db.label before actually doing the sync.  So
there is a trade off here.  Is it more expensive for the server to
handle the long command line when using individual files, or for the
server to do the additional lookup in db.label?  Does the server have
any optimizations that allow syncs to labels to go faster than syncs
to filelists?

I have another separate question.  If I want to sync my current client
to a label, but I only want to get the files in the label that are
newer than the ones I have in my client currently, is there an easy
way to that?  There's also the problem of files that get added or
deleted, but I'll think about that later.  I suspect to do anything
really interesting I'd have to use branches.

I'm actually considering rewriting this script to use labels again,
but am stil trying to decide if it's worth doing.  When the script was
written, there was also an issue that p4 labels used to lock more than
just the db.label file.  Since this is fixed in newer versions, I'm
hoping that performance of the label lookups would no longer be an
issue.

Thanks,
-L

Once upon a time (like on Jan 07, 2008), Jeff A. Bowles wrote:
> (polite cough)
> 
> I think that you might find that functionality in one of the P4V  
> "labels" mechanisms, with a whole lot less wear-and-tear on the server.
> 
>    -Jeff Bowles
> 
> On Jan 7, 2008, at 11:25 AM, Lloyd Cha wrote:
> >For better or worse, we use a home-grown script that generates a
> >"release file list" which defines a list of files and versions that
> >define a particular release.  This release file is then also checked
> >...