I have, in perforce, a sort of 'basic working set' of files that I keep checked out (and therefore writable) when working. However, every time I commit my changes, this list gets disrupted - some things committed, others reverted - and then I have to waste time tracking down and checking out all these files again.
So, is there some way to save the list of currently checked out files, and then later check out those same files again?
I primarily use P4V, but I have P4Win and command-line Perforce available. I'd strongly prefer a GUI solution, though.
I only want to save and restore the state of which files are checked out, not the contents of those files, so shelving is not the answer
I am aware of the 'Do not submit unchanged' and 'Check out after submit' options. They are not sufficient. For instance, frequently I will have files which are programmatically generated which register as 'changed' when the only thing that is different is the 'File generated on' timestamp; I need to prevent such spurious revisions from being submitted, and I have not found any practical method of searching for and managing such files that doesn't involve the 'revert if unchanged' command.
You can do:
p4 -ztag opened | grep depotFile | cut -d ' ' -f 3 > files.txt
to save a list of files already open in your client. (If you don't have Unix utilities for Windows, you could construct this list by whatever means you want, such as running p4 opened > files.txt and manually editing files.txt in an editor.)
Once you have a list of files, you can open all of them via:
p4 -x files.txt edit
This doesn't meet your preference for a GUI-based solution, but you could create .cmd scripts to perform these actions and then double-click on them (or on shortcuts to them).
The easiest solution would be to exclude those generated files via your workspace specification, e.g., "-//depot/files/ignorablefile.sh"
They can still reside in your local workspace, but the app will not attempt to update them or add them to source control.
You said that shelving's not the answer, but that's what I would go with as the easiest solution (i.e. the one that involves the least scripting and/or fewest manual steps) for the specific question you're asking:
Shelve your pending change (let's call this change 1000).
Move your open files to a new pending change (let's call this change 1001).
Submit change 1001.
Unshelve change 1000.
Sync and resolve.
Now you have the same exact files open (the unshelve opened them) but at the head revision (the sync and resolve does that).
Now, looking past what you asked for to what might make your life easier: rather than reverting the files you don't want to submit (and having some sort of scheme to get them back later, possibly via shelving as described above), what I'd do is move them to another changelist. So instead of:
Identify "unchanged" files.
Revert unchanged files.
Submit remaining files with "reopen" option.
Reopen previously reverted files (somehow).
I'd do:
Identify "unchanged" files.
Move unchanged files to another changelist N.
Submit remaining files with "reopen" option.
Move all files from changelist N back to the default changelist.
All of those except step 1 are simple one-shot commands that you can do from any client. Personally, I'd automate steps 1+2 with a script (I'm assuming it's programmatically possible to determine whether the only diff in one of these files is the timestamp) and put it into P4Win/P4V as a "custom tool".
Related
In P4, I only want to pull file changed my client workspace from server. But When I use "p4 sync", this command get all files from server. So, How to get files changed from list revision ? with the files were existed on local and not changed, the command P4 sync do not need sync. My command is here:
p4 sync -f //depot/...#Revision
If you want to restore a file you deleted with p4 delete file, use p4 revert file, not p4 sync. p4 sync is for getting the changes that other people made to the files, not for altering the changes that you made.
There are three different reasons that the files in your workspace might differ from the current head revision in the depot:
A new revision has been submitted to the depot since the last time you synced.
You have opened the files (e.g. with p4 edit) and made changes to them that are not yet submitted.
You have modified the read-only synced files in your workspace without opening them.
(You don't say in your question which of these is the case, which is why you've gotten a couple of different answers that are based on different assumptions about your workspace state -- I'm guessing it's #3, personally, but I'll give the answer for each one so you can understand how it's "supposed" to work vs what's actually going on here.)
In case 1, a normal p4 sync command will update only the files with new revisions. If the revision you previously synced is the same as the head revision, p4 sync won't update it. This makes p4 sync very fast -- you can have a million files in your workspace, and if only one of them has changed since you last sync, only that one file is affected.
In case 2, no p4 sync command will update the files, in the interest of preserving your open changes. To submit your changes to the depot, use p4 submit; to discard them, use p4 revert. Again, only the open files are affected by these commands, so a revert operation affecting only a few files isn't slowed down by however many other files are in your workspace.
In case 3, your workspace is in an inconsistent state -- Perforce's standard workflow is that any time you modify a local file you should "open" it so that the server can track your local work (and optimize operations like sync, submit, etc, as well as alert other users who open those files simultaneously to potential conflicts). If you modify a file locally without modifying it, commands like sync will no longer work as well because the state of your client is not known to the server.
You can recover from an inconsistent state by using the p4 reconcile command (which will open all the inconsistent files so that you can either submit or revert them), or the p4 clean command (which irrevocably discards the inconsistent local changes, as if you'd done p4 reconcile immediately followed by p4 revert). These commands are significantly slower than a normal sync operation since they need to scan the entire workspace rather than only the changed files, but they are still significantly faster than a sync -f since only the changed files are actually re-transferred.
I have a few files that have been edited by an external IDE, I forgot to Check Out the files before making the changes however when I look at the files through P4V the files have changed but the indicator for the file itself shows as nothing has changed. How can I ensure my changes are committed without loosing what I have done?
One way I was thinking was to making a copy of the file, revert, check out, copy content or replace file.
That is OK with a few files but what happens when you have done so with hundreds of files?
The "check out" command doesn't modify the local file, so you can just do that on its own without having to make a backup copy of the file first. (What you want to avoid doing is "get latest", although if the local files are writable, Perforce will automatically balk at updating them by default because of this exact situation.)
If you have lots of files that might or might not have been modified in different ways, use Actions > Reconcile Offline Work, or "p4 reconcile" from the command line. This will find the locally modified files and open them for the appropriate action.
The P4V way to do this is called "Reconcile Offline Work": http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/p4v/Offline.html
Or, at the command line, you can use 'p4 reconcile': http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/cmdref/p4_reconcile.html
In Perforce, I have created a change list that has over 200,000 files (by doing a rename on a directory). This change list is now too big to submit or revert. When I try, I get an error saying that the operation took too long.
I am now stuck with this change list that has my original directory in marked for delete state and a new directory that hasn't been submitted. Is there a way undo this change list?
You can revert the files a few at a time. As a test, you could run p4 revert //path/to/some/file and verify that it's able to revert that file.
Once you know that's working, you just need a way to automate the process.
You could script something up that starts in the root directory and runs through all directories breadth-first, running p4 revert //path/to/folder/* at each folder (I think you could also use client paths).
You can revert via the command line using the p4 tool. I do not think you can revert the files from the UI. The associated documentation shows various examples of how revert all or specific files (see the Examples section):
http://www.perforce.com/perforce/r12.1/manuals/cmdref/revert.html
Let's say I have a project under //depot/MyProject. At changelist 1001, this project took a major change in direction, changing everything about it. At changelist 2001, it got p4 deleted. The depot is now at change 3000.
I'd like to restore //depot/MyProject back to its state at changelist 1000. Specifically, I'd like the revision history to record the fact that change 3001 is an integration of change 1000 - i.e. the last version of this project before the major change.
Can Perforce do this at all? Or do I have to rename it into something like //depot/MyProjectOriginal, because //depot/MyProject is now tainted with all those deleted revisions?
(the naive attempt to p4 integrate //depot/MyProject/...#1000 //depot/MyProject/... fails with an "all revision(s) already integrated" message)
You cannot force the integration.
You have two options: you can create a branch using changelist 1000 as the base; or sync to changelist 1000, check out all files, and then submit (a.k.a rolling back).
Option 1
If you do want the history of your changes between 1001-3000 (i.e. a fresh start from changelist 1000) then this is the better option. Using P4V, create a new branchspec and then perform an integrate from your current project to the new branch at changelist 1000. This will be submitted as changelist 3001, when you compare differences between revisions, you will not see of the changes between 1001-3000.
In the P4 visualizer this will appear as a new branch creation at 1000.
Option 2
Sync to changelist 1000, check out all files, and then submit. There should not be any conflicts to resolve. This will be submitted as changelist 3001, however when you review history you will see the everything.
I hope this makes sense, any questions, please ask.
I don't believe that you can integrate files on top of one another like that. I think that you have two options.
If you are willing to move the files, you can do a
p4 integ //depot/MyProject/...#1000 //depot/MyOriginal/Project/...
and that will integrate MyProject at changelist 1000 to the new location.
If you'd like to keep the project at the same place, you can do that as well. It's really easiest in p4v - you can right click on the folder in workspace or depot view and choose "rollback...". In the subsequent dialog, you can then pick a changelist (or date, revision, etc) to roll the folder back to. In your case, I think that you would choose changelist 1000. Stick the files into a new pending changelist (I think that this is always good practice). You can then run a preveiw (to see what would happen), save the contents to a new changelist (so that you can inspect file contents before submitting), or just go for broke and pull the trigger and submit (I generally wouldn't recommend this).
HTH
Just do:
p4 copy //depot/MyProject/...#1000 //depot/MyProject/...
This also make a nice revision graph.
Though there is an accepted answer and plenty of other solutions, none of them works for me coz I need to rollback a large directory (with GBs of data)
Here is the way I used, which works fine for huge directory:
(Suggested to do in a new and clean workspace, though not strictly required)
Assuming the directory to rollback is //depot/foo/bar and you want to rollback to changelist 1234
Make sure no one is locking any files, and make sure the directory you are trying to rollback exists in your client spec
p4 copy -v //depot/foo/bar/...#1234 //depot/foo/bar/...
p4 submit
p4 copy -v is the meat of the solution. It tells Perforce server to perform virtual copy, which means Perforce copies the files but not actually in your workspace. This avoid huge data transfer for file content (when copying and when submitting). In my case, by using "rollback" in P4V (which is doing non-virtual copy), it took over an hour just for copy, and over an hour for submit for my folder. With virtual copy, whole process took me around 1 minute.
The most important thing is, it keep a sensible history. You can see your files being updated and rolled back, and all previous history exists.
use
p4 integrate -f //depot/MyProject/...#1000 //depot/MyProject/...
The -f flag means force an integration even if they have already been integrated.
From http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/cmdref/integrate.html
in perforce, i have a pending list with some changed files. now i want to revert to the base, but without loosing my changes, so i want to back them up somewhere. like saving the DIFFs of each file. at a later time, i want to restore those changes and continue my work.
is this possible? if so, how?
thanks!
there is no need for external tools at all, assuming you are on a unix machine (or have a proper cygwin setup under Windows, haven't tested it.) The only caveat is that Perforce's p4 diff produces an output that is slightly incompatible with patch, therefore you need it to point to your unix diff-command. In your client-root you can do
P4DIFF=/usr/bin/diff p4 diff -du > pending-changes.patch
optional (if you want to revert the open files from the command-line, otherwise use p4v):
p4 revert `p4 opened|awk -F\# '{print $1}'`
Later you would open the files for edit (can be automated by extracting the affected files from the patchfile pending-changes.patch and then:
patch < pending-patches
Depending on your path-layout in your client-root, you have to use the -p#num option of patch to get the patch applied cleanly.
You should be able to do a shelve. It's a way of saving a changelist for future editing. The link below is a Python add-in for Perforce that implements shelve. Also, I know that Practical Perforce has a couple of ways to shelve current changes without an external script. I don't have the book in front of me but I'll try to update this question tonight when I do.
http://public.perforce.com/wiki/P4_Shelve
Linked to from P4Shelve, is P4tar which looks very useful, and does the operations on the client, rather than branching on the server.
Certainly I'll be looking into doing similar things soon.
See also this question:
Sending my changelist to someone else without checking in.
It's basically the same thing.
Create a branch of these files in some appropriate location
Check out the branch versions of the files you have edited
Copy the edited files over from the trunk and submit them
Revert the files on the trunk
Now you've got those "diffs" you wanted safely archived. When your ready to apply those changes later on, just integrate them back into the trunk.
This is what the Python script, that Brett mentioned, does. This is the way to do it manually without any special tools.