Perforce in FreeBSD Development

Scott Long

<scottl@FreeBSD.org>

$FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/p4-primer/article.sgml,v 1.11 2008/08/06 22:03:49 pgj Exp $

Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Getting Started
3 Clients
4 Syncing
5 Branches
6 Integrations
7 Submit
8 Editing
9 Changes, Descriptions, and History
10 Diffs
11 Adding and Removing Files
12 Working with diffs
13 Renaming files
14 Interactions between FreeBSD CVS and Perforce
15 Offline Operation
16 Notes for Google Summer of Code

1 Introduction

The FreeBSD project uses the Perforce version control system to manage experimental projects that are not ready for the main CVS repository.

1.1 Availability, Documentation, and Resources

While Perforce is a commercial product, the client software for interacting with the server is freely available from Perforce. It can be easily installed on FreeBSD via the devel/perforce port or can be downloaded from the Perforce web site at http://www.perforce.com/perforce/loadprog.html, which also offers client applications for other OS's.

While there is a GUI client available, most people use the command line application called p4. This document is written from the point of view of using this command.

Detailed documentation is available online at http://www.perforce.com/perforce/technical.html.

Reading the “Perforce User's Guide” and “Perforce Command Reference” is highly recommended. The p4 application also contains an extensive amount of online help accessible via the p4 help command.

The FreeBSD Perforce server is hosted on perforce.freebsd.org, port 1666. The repository is browsable online at http://perforce.freebsd.org. Some portions of the repository are also automatically exported to a number of CVSup servers.

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