Re: Public Access to Perforce?

Very well said.  And very useful since reading this helps me to 
understand better what is going on behind the scenes.

At some point in the future, it would be nice if this type of local 
experimentation and the mainline were brought under the same 
infrastructure (subversion/whatever).  But I don't think there is any 
hurry since the current setup doesn't appear to be an obstacle.

Richard Coleman
rcoleman_at_criticalmagic.com

Robert Watson wrote:
> 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