It seems as though many are interpreting directory versioning to mean
the existence of a directory. That is not what is implied by that term.
With file versioning, the "contents" of the file are what is being
versioned. With directory versioning, the "contents" of the directories
are versioned. In essence, filenames become contents of the directory
rather than the file it marks.
The most extreme case of this is where you want to rename file.a to
file.b and create a new empty file.a. In Perforce this resurrects the
old file and when doing a history you see the history of file.b as
though it belonged to file.a which it doesn't.
Of course, this could also be accomplished without full directory
versioning but it certainly makes it much easier to impliment.
Jeff
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Grills [mailto:jgrills@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2005 9:12 PM
To: 'Ivey, William'; perforce-user@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [p4] Perforce vs. Clear Case
I don't think it's usually a problem to create a placeholder.txt file to
cause a directory to be created if that directory is expected to exist
by the build scripts (or whatever else). It does cause administrators
some small amount of grief when people ask for a new project directory
and you grant the permissions, but the end users don't think that you've
done your part because they can't see anything in perforce (which, of
course, is because no files exist in there yet, so the directory doesn't
exist). Users just don't seem to get that you can have permissions on a
namespace that doesn't appear within a p4 GUI.
I think the big reason that people want directories versioned (please
correct me if I'm wrong) is to deal with file renames better. If you
rename a file that is branched somewhere else, it becomes problematic to
link up the source file and the branched file in some reasonable
(preferably completely automatic) fashion. Perforce could certainly
handle that better than it does today.
j
-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:perforce-user-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ivey, William
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2005 10:37 AM
To: perforce-user@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [p4] Perforce vs. Clear Case
It would be a nice feature to version directories in some cases, but we
find that directories usually fall into two categories:
1. The directory contains source files
2. The directory is initially empty and will be created as
the result of some build process
In the first case, the directory is stored as a side effect of
versioning the source file.
In the second case, the directory is an output object and, as with most
output, should not be versioned (in most cases). We make directory
creation part of the build process - either explictly or as a target in
a makefile, etc.
Still, there are cases where putting just a directory into Perforce
would be convenient. -Wm
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