David wrote: > Thanks Berend. That clarifies what you were meaning. A large > part of working out how best to restructure our source > control is coming to understand what the options are, hence > my questions ;-). > > A couple of little questions for Berend, Paul or anyone else > using Perforce. > > Does Perforce make it fairly easy to see which changes have > occurred in a branch and have NOT yet been merged back into > another branch (ie back into the Reference branch)?
Yes, very easily but it's not necessarily organised the way you might like (i.e. in my case, files grouped into individual changesets, and sorted by changeset). But Perforce is very automatable/scriptable so I wrote a Delphi app which did the necessary twiddling. There is an undocumented command (it's mentioned in the Perforce book) that does more of what I wanted but having written the tool, it actually does more heavy lifting than they do so I prefer it. Since then I've gone even further by scripting Perforce using Python (there's actually two Python interface libraries for Perforce now). These scripts handle all my multiple codeline merge tasks relatively effortlessly which was tedious to do via the GUI or command line. Mind you, that only gets to be an issue when you're handling 6 code lines at once (i.e. 3 releases being worked on in parallel (prior, current, future) x 2 promotion stages). As a general approach, Perforce focusses on getting the core operations fast and rock-solid and then allowing you to automate it to meet your particulat (and peculiar) requirements rather than forcing you to live within the limits of some pre-supplied GUI and command line tools. I personally prefer that kind of product (Accredo follows essentially the same philosophy) but others will have different preferences. Once Subversion finally gets merge history tracking, it might become usable for true codeline management but Perforce is also *fast* especially over a WAN/VPN link, and has earned an enviable reputation for rock solid reliability. Subversion has a fair ways to go on those fronts.... > Also, is it fairly easy (in Perforce) to only branch off some > of the files in the reference subfolder to the project > subfolder, instead of all of them? Yes, at it's core, Perforce does file level branch and merging. Folder level is a client/UI convenience :-) TTFN, Paul. _______________________________________________ NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi mailing list Post: delphi@delphi.org.nz Admin: http://delphi.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi Unsubscribe: send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with Subject: unsubscribe
