Re: Public Access to Perforce?

On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, David Rhodus wrote:

> With the perforce trees being hidden away without public access to the
> changes, this makes the FreeBSD project no longer an open source
> project. 

That comment seems to be in stark contrast to reality.  One of the most
important goals in using Perforce to supplement CVS has been to get
developers to stop keeping weeks or months of "in progress" changes solely
on their notebook or workstation, and to increase collaboration
opportunities among developers.  Previously, developers would maintain
large oustanding change sets on local machines as they developed features
that were too "in progress" to merge to the main tree.  This presented a
risk to the project: by not maintaining this source on backed up systems,
the chances of accidental deletion or loss, theft, crash, etc, were
unsettlingly high.  By providing access to a Perforce repository for
personal or small project use, we've allowed developers to move personal
development off of local and potentially unreliable systems onto a
centrally manged "work in progress" server with revision control.  If this
weren't enough, the benefits of having three-way merging to better
maintain and update "in progress" work with local revision control have
improved efficiency and collaboration. 

As already pointed out, most if not all of the interesting "in progress" 
work in Perforce is regularly and mechanically exported as patch sets or
via cvsup by the developers, something they can now do much more easily
now than they could before.  Most of the major group work going on in
Perforce is exported via cvsup10 (TrustedBSD, etc).  In addition, many
developers post regular patch sets of the remaining work (SMPng, ...) to
mailing lists or personal/project web sites.  For example, instead of
hosting the TrustedBSD work on an independent CVS server and having to
maintain separate infrastructure, the TrustedBSD work is hosted on the
FreeBSD Perforce server, making its source trees accessible via FreeBSD's
cvsup infrastructure.  When you subscribe to the TrustedBSD CVS list, you
actually get a feed of the Perforce change sets from the TrustedBSD
section of the FreeBSD Perforce repository.

I think you'd have to work fairly hard to find open source projects that
have no ouststanding local patch sets of as-yet uncommitted and
experimental changes; by providing a central infrastructure to manage
this, we're helping developers to avoid loss and collaborate better/more.
Local and experimental changes are a necessary part of the development
process for any reasonably large project, as the software mainline
requires greater stability than the stability of every work in progress. 
CVS is notoriously poor at providing for this sort of branched development
capability; while I know there's interest in other open source revision
control systems to play the role Perforce is currently playing, attempts
to import the FreeBSD revision history into other open source systems have
generally failed due to the volume of changes and history present in the
FreeBSD project.  Undoubtably, people will keep trying until an open
source revision control product is up to it.

The unavailability of the perforce.freebsd.org web site is due to bugs in
the older version of the Perforce web server, and that the software has
not yet been upgraded.  Hopefully that will be fixed soon, as that site
was beneficial to everyone.  However, I'm having trouble thinking of much
or any on-going work in Perforce that doesn't get merged rapidly or made
available via other means.  If there's specific work you are interested in
that isn't exported, I can make it available to you easily.  I believe the
general purpose submit list is also subscribable, although the volume of
local changes is extremely high due to their "in progress"  nature. 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert_at_fledge.watson.org      Principal Research Scientist, McAfee Research