They're roughly the same overhead in the database, but in different tables. Also, a label is slightly more cumbersome in that there's no history for updates of a label; a branch has to have explicit operations (integrate/resolve) to push content to/from it.

My question is, are these the only choices to track an overnight build? I would argue that there are other choices.

Probably the most attractive, low-cost way to track the contents of the overnight build is to do this: 1. Acknowledge that you're building the most recent revision of the files in some tree in your repository, as of 2 AM (or whatever) each night. (If this isn't a valid statement, then step #2 will use some other method to track the contents.) 2. The command "p4 changes -m1 -s submitted //depot/main/..." (or whatever the codeline name is) will give you the change number of the most recently submitted change. (It's a complete line, actually, so pipe this to "cut -d' ' -f2 " first.) YOUR BUILD SCRIPT SHOULD GET THIS CHANGE NUMBER AS ITS FIRST STEP. If it's a shell script, for example, the first lines might be: TopChangeNumber=`p4 changes -m1 -s submitted //depot/main/... | cut -f2 -d' ' ` Or perhaps, even: CodeLine=main TopChangeNumber=`p4 changes -m1 -s submitted //depot/$CodeLine/... | cut -f2 -d' ' ` 3. Put this pair: ($CodeLine, $TopChangeNumber) into a version.h file that all source files include. Have your programs support "programname -version" to print it out. 4. When you retrieve the files to do the build, use the commands: a. "p4 sync #none" (empty the workspace of Perforce-managed files) b. del /s (or rm -rf) the workspace (empty of all other files) c. "p4 sync //depot/$CodeLine/...@$TopChangeNumber" (get the files) d. Make your version.h file that refers to $CodeLine and $TopChangeNumber 5. Do the compiles.

This has almost no data storage overhead, since that changenumber is derived from data that's live at the time of the build.

And it's absolutely immutable.

-Jeff Bowles Perforce Consulting Partner

ps. Thanks to James Strickland (Perforce) for emphasizing, in his many examples, that you really HAVE to use 'p4 changes -s submitted' to avoid picking up change numbers of pending/not-submitted changes that would blow this into little bits.

At 12:20 AM 6/5/2001 -0400, you wrote: