This one's actually fairly easy to understand. The problem isn't with the GUI tools (P4Merge, which lets you merge changes when integrating) and P4Diff (which simply displays diffs between Perforce file versions).
RB doesn't use the GUI tools, it uses the command line tools. The area we're concerned with here is that there's more or less a "standard" way to say "show me what changes have been made to this file" and that is the command line "diff" utility. You can do "svn diff <file>" or "cvs diff <file>" or "p4 diff <file>" and it will show you what has changed in that file, so you can decide if you want to submit the changes or not. The problem is that the output of the "p4 diff <file>" command is different from the output of the "cvs diff <file>" command (and all of the other tools which produce a format similar to the "GNU diffutils" formatting.) So RB has to re-format this "diff" output so that it can be handled properly. The RBTools package provides the "post-review" tool which does this work. Does that make sense? You can still use P4Merge and P4Diff, etc, you just can't take the output from those tools and directly upload them to RB, and post-review is the tool that makes that happen. Note that you can add a "custom tool" in P4V so that you can simply right-click on a changelist and upload it to RB directly (basically, you tell it to call post-review and it uploads the files as described above) and then you're entirely in GUI-land and don't even need to load a command line (though you still do need to have RBTools installed.) Dana Lacoste -----Original Message----- From: reviewboard@googlegroups.com [mailto:reviewbo...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of rifferte Sent: Friday, May 21, 2010 6:15 AM To: reviewboard Subject: Question on Perforce & Diffs Can someone explain the following lines from the documentation: "If you use Perforce, though, you'll need to use post-review instead of the web UI. Note that this means you can't just use a standard diff generated by the diff tool. You'll need to consult your version control system's documentation for information on generating diffs." "post-review must be used if you're using Perforce with Review Board, as the diff generated by p4 diff doesn't provide the information necessary to properly display a side-by-side diff." I am interpreting this to mean that I cannot use Perforce's built in diff tool (P4Merge). But, you could interpret this as meaning you can use P4Diff with post-review. I am currently up and running using Perforce + GNU DiffUtil which is working fine, but I just wanted some clarity on this point (it would save having to install another 3rd party tool). What is it exactly about Perforce that limits the use of the WebUI? Thanks, - Ron -- Want to help the Review Board project? Donate today at http://www.reviewboard.org/donate/ Happy user? Let us know at http://www.reviewboard.org/users/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- To unsubscribe from this group, send email to reviewboard+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/reviewboard?hl=en -- Want to help the Review Board project? Donate today at http://www.reviewboard.org/donate/ Happy user? Let us know at http://www.reviewboard.org/users/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- To unsubscribe from this group, send email to reviewboard+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/reviewboard?hl=en
