[p4] How to handle "closed" branches - Grills, Jeff - com.perforce.perforce-user

11 messages in com.perforce.perforce-user[p4] How to handle "closed" branches

From	Sent On	Attachments
Ulf	03 Mar 2004 12:38
ste...@vance.com	03 Mar 2004 15:12
Ulf	03 Mar 2004 15:26
jab	03 Mar 2004 15:58
Gordon Broom	03 Mar 2004 16:00
Ulf	03 Mar 2004 16:24
Craig Allsop	03 Mar 2004 18:21
Chuck Karish	04 Mar 2004 07:49
Chuck Karish	04 Mar 2004 07:58
Grills, Jeff	04 Mar 2004 09:55
Chuck Karish	05 Mar 2004 09:08

Subject:	[p4] How to handle "closed" branches
From:	Grills, Jeff (jgri...@soe.sony.com)
Date:	03/04/2004 09:55:53 AM
List:	com.perforce.perforce-user

I disagree. Deleting the files is a file operation. If you delete the files in the branch, and then reverse integrate using the branch, you'll end up deleting all the files on the other side of the branch. That is not desired behavior. You simply want to hide the branch. I'd suggest people do that using their clients, and not with perforce permissions.

Personally, we use/reuse 5 branches. When one gets "closed", it becomes available for someone else to take. That way we don't continuously grow the number of branches we have. We use the branch owner and branch description to track who owns the branch and what it's used for, which is really easy to see in the P4Win branch view.

-----Original Message----- From: perf...@perforce.com [mailto:perforce-user-admin at perforce.com]On Behalf Of Chuck Karish Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2004 9:59 AM To: Gordon Broom Cc: Ulf; perforce-user at perforce.com Subject: Re: [p4] How to handle "closed" branches

Gordon Broom wrote:

All I know is that it's a Really Bad Thing to delete the closed branch,

since deleting is an operation on the branch data and hiding the branch

is something you want to do to the metadata.

'p4 delete' is purely a metadata operation. It's reversible, except that some metadata is lost (common ancestor to be used for resolving integrations). 'rm -rf' of a directory in the depot isn't an SCM operation; it's vandalism.

You could obliterate, but that's even worse: you've lost all the history, it's as if that branch never existed. So neither operation is appropriate. I think removing "list" permissions is the closest thing to what you're looking for, semantically.

How does everyone else do this?

Encourage users not to set overly-broad client views, set maxresults so

that users can't browse the bigger directories, and tell p4win and p4v users not to use depot view. And try to get GUI users to turn off auto-update.

Chuck