-----Original Message----- From: Paul C. Pharr [mailto:pharr at nemetschek.net] Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 6:10 AM To: eblom at cypressmicro.com Cc: perforce-user at perforce.com Subject: Re: [p4] tagging a file (label?)

Hi all,

I don't entirely understand why many people are so eager to use labels to identify regular builds. We use changelists to identify the files in a build and simply abide by the rule that anything we are going to build must come out of Perforce identified by a single changelist number. The downside to this is that if we need to make some ugly adjustment to an individual file such as backing it off a revision or two in order to get a shippable build (which we need to do only very rarely in practice), we will submit the change so that the built version is represented by a changelist rather than a label of some arbitrary set of files and associated revisions. Since everything that we ship or test comes out of our autobuild system, the rule pretty much enforces itself. It can't be made into a build until you get it into Perforce.

In my opinion, this has a huge number of advantages and no real downside for us. I feel comfortable that labels provide another powerful file referencing system waiting in the wings if we ever need it, but I'm just as happy not using them for now.

Does anyone have a counter-argument? What situation or project organization would prevent the use of a changelist based system system like this as opposed to a more flexible but possibly harder to administer label based system.

Thanks!

Paul C. Pharr Nemetschek North America

At 06:19 PM 1/7/2003 -0800, you wrote: