[p4] Erm... what's that branch - Chuck Karish - com.perforce.perforce-user

8 messages in com.perforce.perforce-user[p4] Erm... what's that branch

From	Sent On	Attachments
Hardy, Andrew	31 Oct 2002 05:23
Stephen Vance	31 Oct 2002 06:12
Hardy, Andrew	31 Oct 2002 06:45
Matthew Rice	31 Oct 2002 07:09
Chuck Karish	31 Oct 2002 07:26
Hardy, Andrew	31 Oct 2002 08:01
Chuck Karish	31 Oct 2002 08:40
wiv...@us.itmasters.com	31 Oct 2002 09:10

Subject:	[p4] Erm... what's that branch
From:	Chuck Karish (kar...@well.com)
Date:	10/31/2002 07:26:40 AM
List:	com.perforce.perforce-user

At 02:46 PM 10/31/2002 +0000, Hardy, Andrew wrote:

I think that the confusion is arising for us about what 'delete a branch' does. We expected the branch and associated files to disappear from the repository, whilst all it seems to do is delete the BranchSpec.

If you want to delete the files, delete the files. The branch spec is a handle for referring to the files and for controlling the way changes are integrated between the two sides of the branch.

We're further confused because p4win actually shows the 'branches' as sub-directories of the branched from directory e.g. if we created branch 'branchtest' on directory 'wibble' we end up with a new directory 'wibble/branchtest'.

Yes, the branch appears as a new file hierarchy. You can put it wherever you like.

Having 'deleted' a branch, p4win continues to the show the directory and its contents but *they don't exist* on the repository itself.

We seem to be stuck looking at things that shouldn't exist?

If you delete the branch spec and delete all the files on the branch (using p4win or p4) the files won't show up when you sync a client workspace to the head revisions. The files should still be present in the repository, so their history is available in case you want to sync back to a previous state.

VSS does this, too, in a somewhat broken way, but it hides the deleted files from you.