Perforce Streams - Isolating imported libraries

Question

I need some guidance on a use case I've run into when using Perforce Streams. Say I have the following structure:

//ProductA/Dev:
  share ...

//ProductA/Main
  share ...
  import Component1/... //Component1/Release-1_0/...

//ProductA/Release-1_0
  share ...

//Component1/Dev
  share ...

//Component1/Main
  share ...

//Component1/Release-1_0
  share ...

ProductA_Main imports code from Component1_Release-1_0. Whenever Component1_Release-1_0 gets updated, it will automatically be available to ProductA (but read-only).

Now. The problem I'm running into is that since ProductA_Release-1_0 inherits from Main and thus also imports Component1_Release-1_0, any code or changes made to the component will immediately affect the ProductA Release. This sort of side effect seems very risky.

Is there any way to isolate the code such that in the release stream such that ALL code changes are tracked (even code that was imported) and there are 0 side-effects from other stream depots but for main and and dev streams, the code is imported. This way, the release will have 0 side effects, while main and dev conveniently import any changes made in the depot.

I know one option would be to create some sort of product specific release stream in the Component1 depot, but that seems a bit of a kludge since Component1 shouldn't need any references to ProductA.

Answer 1

If you are just looking to be able to rebuild the previous versions, you can use labels to sync the stream back to the exact situation it was in at the time by giving a change list number (or label) to p4 sync.

If you are looking for explicit change tracking, you may want to branch the component into your release line. This will make the release copy of the library completely immune to changes in the other stream, unless you choose to branch and reconcile the data from there. If you think you might make independent changes to the libraries in order to patch bugs, this might be something to consider. Of course, perforce won't copy the files in your database on the server, just pointers to them in the metadata, and since you're already importing them into the stream, you're already putting copies of the files on your build machines, so there shouldn't be any "waste" except on the metadata front.

In the end, this looks like a policy question. Rebuilding can be done by syncing back to a previous version, but if you want to float the library fixes into the main code line, leave it as is; if you want to lock down the libraries and make the changes explicit, I'd just branch the libraries in.

Integrating into your release branch

In answer to the question in the comments, if you choose to integrate directly into your release branch, you'll need to remove the import line from the stream specification and replace it with the isolate line which would then place the code only in the release branch. Then you would use the standard p4 integrate command (or p4v) to integrate from the //Component1/Release-1_0/... to //ProductA/Main/Component1/....

Firming up a separate component stream

One final thought is that you could create another stream on the //Component1 line to act as a placeholder for the release.