Issam --

This is a tough call. On the one hand, you don't want viruses lying around. On the other, they're part of your configuration management history.

Detection without automatic cleaning is probably the right thing. When you detect one, manually perform any cleaning steps. Fortunately, viruses are unlikely to be found in text files, only binaries. Binaries are stored as full revisions, although you'll need to make sure your virus scanner can scan the contents of gzipped files in order to catch viruses in compressed binaries, in which most virus-prone formats will be stored.

Once you detect a virus and decide to clean it, you will need to regenerate the perforce verify signatures for the files. (You are running 'p4 verify -qu' and 'p4 verify' to validate the integrity of your Perforce data before backup up, right?) You can force the signature to be recomputed with 'p4 verify -quv' for the specific file.

You will also need to decide what to do with viruses that can't be cleaned. If the revision is unimportant, you could obliterate the revision. If it's important, you have a big dilemma.

Steve

At 11:26 AM 12/2/2003, Issam Alkawaf wrote: