"We are a new Perforce customer. We want to build our C code on Solaris in such a way that we can automatically pick up the latest code from the Perforce depot. We will use either make or Jam. What experiences have people had with this?"

This isn't quite enough of a question - you could be asking two or three different things.

If you want to have code checked in so that when a developer asks to update their own copy of the source, it gives them the latest -- that's the default way people use it. "p4 sync" (with no args) gets all the files specified in the client spec, the top revision.

If you want to have a place on the machine that houses the "p4 depot" that has a clear-text copy of the source for reference, you can set up a perl script to do this, effectively using a "p4 review" mechanism.

If you want to have a place on the machine that houses the "p4 depot" that has a clear-text copy of the source for people to retrieve copies to work on, don't do it. Part of the help that "p4" provides is to track what revision each person has so that when the files are modified/submitted, it knows what user's copies need to be updated when they next run "p4 sync".

-Jeff Bowles