After reading a lot about Subversion I decided that it still sounded a bit too much like CVS for my tastes, and decided to give Perforce a serious try. I've played with it before, but never tried to use it for anything productive.
I happened to be evaluating a package that provides Eclipse project files (Alfresco) so I decided to see if I could not only download the source and get it to build, but to get it checked into Perforce and see if I could access it via the Eclipse P4 plugin. Since I was dealing with three pieces, all new to me, this was a lot harder than it sounds.
I thought I kept notes on the Perforce install/setup process, but I can't find them now. I'll try to remember to document it here next time I do it. I have the server on one system and client on my desktop, so it was a tad more complicated than the all-in-one case.
The really hard part was getting things set up so that the P4 plugin worked correctly. I ended up with the following notes:
- create local client workspace in Perforce and update to populate it with files (I'm using P4V to do this)
- fire up Eclipse and create it's workspace somewhere else
- do File->Import->Existing Projects into Workspace to import files from Perforce workspace
- do Right Click->Team->Share Project on each project (because this source base contains multiple projects)
The thing that really threw me was that you can also go into the Perforce view in Eclipse and there is an import option there too, but it does not recognize the .project files that the Eclipse import does and so you end up with a "dead" project you can't do anything with. It took getting help from both Perforce support and the P4 mailing list to straighten this out, but now that I know the magic steps it works fine.
This is all probably an academic exercise as I don't actually think we are going to use Alfresco for anything (they seem to be a tad unclear on what being an Open Source project actually means) and the direction Apple has taken with tying the WO development tools to XCode may mean I won't be able to use Eclipse anyway, but it was educational nonetheless.
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