Hi Guys,

We have two Perforce servers that we use here at work. One is our 'public' server which contains all our Open Source code (stuff we develop along with other hosted projects), and the other is our private server with our proprietry code on it. In the past I had the private server connect to the public server as a remote depot. This worked fine except that the remote depot was read-only, and to open or submit changes to the public depot you had to use a 'p4p' alias. The disadvantage of doing this is that files submitted to the public server ended up getting synced again when we synced up via the public server. Also the change lists in the public server were only in the public server, so there was no correlation between a change in the public server being accessible from the private server.

The advantage to this setup is that the private server was able to keep track of changes in the public server, so when we synced up to labels in the private server it would pull down the correct files from the public server also.

However due to performance reasons (and the disadvantages listed above), we changed our system to simply have two separate depots. One gets checked into our c:\scitech tree (the public stuff) and one gets checked into our c:\private tree (the private stuff). This works fine, except for the fact that when we need to backtrack in our private server to find when a particular bug was introduced, it is a painful task figuring out what change lists in the public and private servers are compatible so we can actually build stuff! This is problematic because our private code depends heavily on a lot of the Open Source stuff that we develop.

So, I was wondering if there is any support is Perforce for distributed remote depots that can connect seamlessly into another depot. Ie: what I want is to have the public server be accessed by public only developers, but private developers would only need to access the private server. The private server would be able to both get changes and read changes from the public server. Also any changes submitted to the public server would show up in the private server. We also want to move the public server off-site for security reasons so it would need to be distributed.

Is that supported yet?

If not, does anyone have any bright ideas about how we can better manage this? Perforce works just great right now, but the whole point of version control is to minimise the effort to go back in history if you need to. A two depot system doesn't handle that very well if the two depots depend each other.

Regards,