Can you share a client spec in Perforce?

Question

It seems rather pointless to have everybody creating the same client for a project in Perforce, so, is there any one one could create a "public" client in Perforce from where everybody could sync from?

Edit: I meant clients like the ones you create in Perforce from a client spec

Answer 1

It's easier to understand the architecture, I believe, if you use the term 'workspace' rather than 'client'. Perforce applications manage files in a designated area of your local disk, called your workspace. As the name implies, your workspace is where you do most of your work. You can have more than one client workspace, even on the same workstation.

Since two different users are generally working independently, on separate workstations or laptops, they each need their own copy of the code, and they each need their own workspace so that they can control when they sync up with the changes in the server.

If you and I try to share a single copy of the code, on a single workstation, we'll find ourselves quickly confused about whose changes are whose; it's much easier for us to work independently, and to merge our changes as separate submissions to the server.

If the issue in your case is that client definitions are complex, with very intricate view definitions, then you may wish to investigate the 'template client' feature: set up a single master client with the view and options that you prefer, and then your other users can use 'client -t' to create workspace definitions that copy the view and options details from the template client.

Answer 2

It's possible to do this, but not advisable. Since Perforce keeps a server-side record of what files are synced to each client, you could run into a situation where:

1. User Fred syncs using the shared client and gets a fresh set of files.
2. Before any changes are committed, user Jim syncs using the shared client and gets nothing because the Perforce server thinks that the client already has an up to date set of files.

Jim could get around this using "p4 sync -f" which will force all the latest files to be synced to his workspace, but that's a kludge around the way Perforce is designed to be used.

Perforce clients are very lightweight in terms of the resources they take up on the server, so it's better not to have shared clients.

I tried to find a more complete explanation of why clients should not be shared in the online Perforce documentation, but it's not very helpful. The book "Practical Perforce" has the best overview I've seen if you happen to have a copy around.

Answer 3

Use a template workspace as Bryan mentioned, or consider using streams. In the streams framework you define the stream view (composition) once, and workspaces are generated automatically.

Answer 4

p4 sync -f is too slow. Because firstly it will delete all the files in your local and then reload the files from central depot! there is a tricky way to do. It is to create a havelist and do sync, when wanting do sync -f. details is 1,get the clientspec, 2, save it to local. 3, delete the client 4, create a same client using the saved clientspec. Therefore we save the time for delete local files.