Introducing Perforce Visual Client as version control tool in an XP
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1. ences between files within your workspace and the repository To diff you run the Diff against have revision command and this displays the differences with a PAV diff tool You can manually set which revisions of the file you want to compare on as well as check the diff on a file between branches 13 9 1 7 Branches Perforce offers a wide support for branching including the ability to perform the composite model in some sense with the use of labels Branching release versions will allow you to maintain the previous release with bug fixes and updates while continue development on the next release without the need to mix code In the context menu you select Branch and then you choose either source files directories or a label which is connected to different files or directories and then select a target path The files will then be copied into the new target path starting on revision 1 corresponds to the selected revision as stated when branching 9 1 8 Support for merge tracking When handling merges and tracking of them Perforce offers a large variety of tools They offer a great overview of the different revision and merges of the files Revision graphs displaying a visual representation of the revision history of the file can be generated in Perforce It also displays the individual commit messages for each commit along with the time author and revision number The changelist of the commit is also displayable for the different revision2. Perforce after at least two weeks or three seemed to give somewhat better overview of branching compared to git SVN This difference could also be that we in the third development session introduced branching and the team then got a better understanding of it compared to teams that had not tried it An important thing to keep in mind is the following quote from one of the students in our team It would be an extreme hassle to execute this whole project without branching The principles of branching were embraced immediately and the team quickly spoke in terms of branching which tells us that it was highly needed for the team The team felt more confident in their development and felt they had more control and stability of the project They also felt less stress before a release because the know that their release branch was always working and a release could easily be produced within minutes 7 3 Diff The results tell us that checking differences in files was somewhat at the same difficulty in Perforce compared to git SVN It is worthy to mention that we in our team has presented and introduced diffing as a function which other teams may not have done 7 4 Limitations In a study conducted on few people one has to realize that the results may vary a lot The study was performed on developers where most of them have only a small amount of experience using a version control system Our results and assessments do not necessarily corres
3. The default setting is that a file is locked when it is not checked out In order to ease the usage of Perforce it can be set up in different ways and can work for many different purposes A versioning server can be reached through the internet by many users as seen to the left in Figure It could also be set up with the Git Fusion tool as seen in the middle by enabling Git users to collaborate with Perforce The last suggestions is by simply be in a sandbox mode where one can bring everything home without having an internet connection to the server while developing as seen to the right FEDERATED CLUSTERING Users jim Perforce Versioning Engine IP Network ioe Users Users Perforce Users Git Users Figure 1 The figure shows three different ways of setting up a Perforce depot and how to use them Source Perforce Webpage 12 Perforce can as many other VCS be run from the terminal However we have focused our in depth study on the visual Perforce client P4V which is entirely run from a stand alone program This has been our chosen program to investigate 3 2 Project Settings Our study was performed during the course EDA260 Software Development in Teams Project The course aims to give students practical experience with software development in teams and the method eXtreme Programming The students are divided into team of 12 14 people The team s goal is to develop a program that registers and sorts time
4. is used to describe a branching strategy Source Brad Appleton s Webpage 11 At the fifth development session the team encountered the first big problem With their own initiative they started using rollback The problem was not solved during the session but at the sixth and final session the program was up and running again 6 Results 6 1 Merging Perforce offers a merging capabilities as shown in Figure 3 2 Bile Edit view search Help Snggon gt a OA EJE m 1 diffs Ignore line ending and white space length differences Tab spacing 4 File format Encoding System Line endings Windows Base ELight java Left Elight2 java Differences from base 0 Right ELight3 java Differences from base 0 Merge Not saved Conflicts i p4d screenshots doris2 ELight java ELight2 java EE tts p4d screenshots doris2 ELight java ELight java p4d screenshots doris2 ELight java ELight3 java 4 public class ELight 4 public class ELight 4 public class ELight Sit 6 7 8 public static final short public static final short public static final short 9 public static final short public static final short public static final short 0 1 1 2 Configured for a broken Configured for a broken Configured for a broken sess 4st ats fins nhare ahlin otstin finsl nha I aukhlis otastin final nhant Not saved public class ELight public static final short E LIGHT STATE OFF public static final short E_LI
5. GHT_STATE_OFF blic static final short E LIGHT STATE OFF public static final short E LIGHT STATE ON Figure 3 The figure shows the visual merging tool of Perforce Source Perforce Website Merge T3 The evaluated knowledge in merging and merge tracking of the students is displayed in Figure 4 Merging Week Skill level 1 6 Our team large dots I Rest small dots 5 4 3 2 2 4 Figure 4 The figure shows the knowledge in merging and merge tracking of the students of our team compared to the rest of the teams 6 2 Branching We had a main branch called release a development branch called dev and one individual branch for each functionality which were created as the teams wanted It was highly appreciated by the team The evaluated knowledge in branching of the students is displayed in Fig ure 5 Branching Week Skill level 1 6 E Our team large dots Rest small dots N N gt Figure 5 The figure shows the knowledge in branching of the students of our team compared to the rest of the teams 6 3 Diff The evaluated knowledge in being able to compare differences between files and different revisions of the same file by the students is displayed in Figure 6 Diff Week Skill level 1 6 Our team large dots Rest small dots n Figure 6 The figure shows the knowledge in being able to compare differences between files and different revisions of the same file by the stude
6. Introducing Perforce Visual Client as version control tool in an XP environment Axelsson Oscar Olsson Daniel datiloax student lu se atfi0dol student lu se March 5 2015 Abstract In a programming course at LTH Subversion is used For inexperi enced developers features like merging branching or checking differences between revisions can be overwhelming in an advanced version control system The aim is to investigate if there is a better alternative to SVN The investigation showed that developers using Perforce rated their ex pertise higher in being able to make diffs handling merge tracking and branching compared to developers that used SVN As of today using ver sion control in a command line environment is more popular than using a visual client but with the uprising of tools like Perforce Visual Client this may change 1 Keywords Version control tools branching diff merging Perforce student project coach ing 2 Introduction In the PVG course the well known version control tool Subversion is used For someone unfamiliar to version control systems one might be overwhelmed by all of its functionality Is there a better software for people who are scared by terminal commands and complex version controlling The authors have gained some previous experience with Perforce from another course at LTH From that experience the conclusions conducted that it could be a good and easy introduction for students with no experi
7. ence of version control The study conducted research on how a team would adapt to the use of Perforce When we later in the study mention Perforce we mean the Visual Perforce client P4V 3 Background 3 1 Perforce background Perforce is a version control system developed by Perforce Software Inc Perforce is according to the developers themselves a fast scalable secure and reliable version management tool and it fits both large and small teams 3 The system manages control and documents different versions named by revision numbers Every new version is documented by a number the author which files it affect what changes and a commit message where the developer could describe the change that was made The synchronization model used by Perforce is the long transaction model 4 Simply put it prevents a developer to submit a file which is not up to date in relation to the depot However Perforce does not support the strict long transaction model There can be dependencies between files which would require a developer to have a certain configuration locally before submitting it to the depot This is only prevented with the strict long transaction model The principles and terminology is quite similar to other version control tools What is called often called commit is called Submit add is Mark For Add remove is Mark for Delete and pull is Get Latest Revision When you are to use a file in Perforce you have to check out the file
8. ents may skew the results Perforce repeatedly shows us that the visual aspects of the client gives the user a very flat learning curve It does not have the same effect as many other terminal based tools where the user feels frightened because of a program s po tential complexity This does not mean that the program is the perfect selection 10 in every situation but with an inexperienced team of version control Perforce is a great alternative Our expectations were exceeded We did not think that we would see such ease when the students worked with a completely new version control system All in all Perforce is an intuitive and easy to use tool for version control We recommend it highly 11 References 1 Version Control http ieeexplore ieee org stamp stamp jsp tp amp arnumber 1576667 Retrieved 2014 12 21 2 Laura Wingerd Practical Perforce 2005 http books google se books hl en amp lr amp id mlm61wb2v3MC amp oi fnd amp pg PT7 amp dq perforce amp ots IYrSyQPoPy amp sig L7YQsBmV6Agjsw9I5XXZonib3NFU amp redir esc ytkv onepage amp q perforce amp f false 3 Perforce Platform Perforce http www perforce com platform 4 Peter H Feiler Configuration management models in commercial environ ments March 1991 Pittsburgh USA 5 P4Eclipse http www perforce com resources presentations developers corner developer takes new visual tools p4eclipse v20101 6 Richard Ge
9. failing The problem with Perforce not having support for strict long transactions was solved by simply telling the students to retrieve the whole depot when getting the latest revision and when they were submitting they were told to submit all of their files and not just a single one The problem was thought to be a trivial one but turned out to cause quite the mess in the depot If Perforce had support for strict long transactions we would believe it would make it more secure to use for inexperienced developers At the third development session branching was introduced and the team adapted to it very well They saw the benefits with it early and became more confident and felt more secure with there development But at the fifth develop ment session a larger problem occurred and the team decided that they needed to rollback the program This created some issues for the team because they where inexperienced by it and we coaches had not given them enough intro duction to it But by the beginning of the sixth development session the team had through a spike gotten better knowledge with it and could then localize the issue The team also found it easier to localize the problem thanks to P4V s diff command which presents it in a easy way more about this is taken up in the diff session The program was finally released and the team was satisfied by the result By the end of it all the team had a pleasant experience with Perforce They had some trouble
10. for any kind of race For our development the race is an Enduro race The team gathers every Monday from 8 17 for the development phase and on Wednesday for a two hour planning meeting The course ends with a live competition where the software is tested by judges of a race 4 Problem statement What are the struggles of using Perforce and what functionality do the students find easy to us Is it better than subversion and would it be appropriate for the PVG course to change their default tool What things are better or worse with Perforce compared to subversion git or any other version control tool Seeing as branching is hardly used in the PVG projects can Perforce with its everyday looking user interface being the comfort that the students need to want to try out branching Merging is a common problem in the course can Perforce help the team feel more secure with merging By the end of the project we hope that the team is satisfied with the result and product that they have produced With the help of Perforce the students have improved their expertise of understanding version control systems in gen eral and feel comfortable using Perforce We also hope that the group feels that Perforce has been an asset rather than a burden DISCONNECTED Sandbox Users Hopefully the graphical user interface that Perforce brings attracts the stu dents more than scaring them away 5 Method Before the first lab we set up Perforce in a way we f
11. iger Perforce with Network Appliance Storage Perforce User Conference 2001 http www perforce com sites default files network application storage geiger pdf 7 Assembla https www assembla com repositories perforce J Bowles S Vance Scripting with Perforce 2005 http www perforce com sites default files scripting with perforce paper_0 pdf 9 R Cowsam Introduction to Branching in Perforce http www vaccaperna co uk scm branching html 10 Y Zhang R Chang Branch Management and Atomic Merge in a Continuous Integration Environment http www perforce com sites default files emc white paper pdf Brad Appleton Streamed Lines Branching Patterns for Parallel Software Development http www bradapp com acme branching 12 Perforce Webpage http www perforce com sites default files git p4 sandbox jpg 13 Merging http www perforce com sites default files perforce p4 merge png 1 12 9 Appendix A 9 1 Quick guide to Perforce This quick guide serves as an introduction to the most commonly used functions within Perforce It is assumed that you have previous knowledge about CVS and that you already have set up your repository and workspace 9 1 1 Commit To be able to edit a file you will need to Check out the file Afterwards when you are finished with your updates you simply Submit in order push your edits to the repository This may be done on both s
12. ingle and multiple files as well as directories 9 1 2 Update When you want to copy the files from the repository to your workspace you use the command Get Latest Revision This could be done by clicking the Depot tab and select the folder or file you want to update There is a possibility to copy older versions to the workspace than the current To do this the Get Revision command is used with the corresponding revision of the file 9 1 3 Add To add files to the repository you have to perform two tasks first the file needs to be marked for add can be found in the context menu which places the file in a changelist When the file is marked for add the file icon is marked by a red plus sign The then changelist needs to be submitted to the repository which adds the file to the repository 9 1 4 Status The status command in Perforce is compared to CVS a graphical display The status of the file can be seen on the file with different icons When you hover over the file a describing dialog appears describing the status of the file If the file e g needs merge or an update 9 1 5 Log The log of a file can be viewed in History where you can see all the Changelists that were created when submitting changes You can view the submit comments and the version number of the changes The changelists can also be compared with the diff command 9 1 6 Diff The diff function within perforce is a versatile tool which lets you check differ
13. nts of our team compared to the rest of the teams 7 Discussion At the first development session Perforce was setup by the team We had before the session estimated that it would take up to several hours to set up and get the team running because of the inexperience by the team But to our surprise the whole team was up and running within the first half hour The team thought that the manual and the set up instructions which was given to them before the session was to very good use giving them the support they needed The development continued and by the end of the day we had over 100 submits from the team Some of the team got expressions from the merge tool but not all They who tried it had a pleasant experience with it The merge tool in Perforce differs a lot from the one the team have experienced in CVS In Perforce all is visual for the developer to see Your code is compared with the two latest versions i the depot from that the developer can select what lines of code should be merged in and not The team found this to be a great asset and felt no fear or anxiety to be faced with merge conflicts One of the problems we discovered with Perforce from the first development session was that when a user created a Perforce account it was automatically looked to that host computer where the account was created This was later solved by changing the settings for the users In week two there were problems with red code in the depot and tests were
14. ound appropriate We had to make a decision whether we wanted to host the repository locally on a server or on LTH or at a network attacked storage 6 such as assembla 7 It was decided that we would use an LTH hosted server At the start of the PVG course we introduced Perforce to the team and they received a short introduction manual see Appendix A of Perforce that we had authored In order for them to start we supervised and helped them if they found anything difficult We found it important to remember that people learn from mistakes and therefore we decided to let the team make all mistakes they had to make in order to learn from them We did document the mistakes and the team did document their experiences with the version control tool at the end of each session It was beneficial for themselves as they were forced to go through and reflect on what they had learned It was also helpful for us because we could analyze the result In an earlier course the team had taken a CVS lab and they gave us a brief analysis of their impressions and thoughts regarding CVS compared to Perforce As we wanted to spread knowledge and expertise within the group we de cided that switching partners was going to be done continuously We hoped that the students would have learned a lot within a couple of weeks This would result in the team being self going within a couple of weeks We discussed whether we would investigate any of Perforce s scripting
15. pond with people who have previous experience using a version control system We chose to not approach the Perforce plug in for Eclipse P4Eclipse because we felt that it would defeat the purpose of the whole study which focuses on Perforce Visual Client Also we did not dive deep in the scripting possibilities of Perforce because we did not feel like it was relevant for the project The in depth study focused on the graphical aspects of a version control system and therefore a decision was made to ignore testing Perforce functionality via terminal commands 7 5 Possible weaknesses There are always drawbacks in a realistic solution What are the drawbacks of using Perforce in the EDA260 course We discussed earlier on that a student in second year may feel uncomfortable using version control in the command line we know from experience that some of us did If the students only learn Perforce Visual Client will the missing expertise in using SVN Git in a terminal window be crucial to have when one has to work at a company We believe that learning the principles of using a version control tool is more important than learning how to use it via a command line The students thereby get a good experience from version control and can easier see the benefits of it 8 Conclusion The results tell us that the usage of Perforce has made it easier for the developers to maintain their code This may vary from different groups and the small sample of stud
16. pos sibilities but decided that we had enough on our plate An article on Perforce scripting can be found at 8 We compared our results within the group with the result of the rest of the teams that used subversion or git We wanted to compare our branching strategy with other group s different branching strategies but decided that there was no time for it Comparison regarding checking differences between files branching and merging were the three main metrics we focused on Other impressions were also asked about from a more broad perspective Since the team was using Eclipse we discussed whether we would use an integrated Perforce tool such as P4Eclipse 5 as opposed to the native Perforce client Due to the fact that our whole in depth study focused on the Perforce Visual Client we felt that it would defeat the whole purpose of the in depth study if we used the integrated Eclipse plug in We wanted to force the team members to learn by themselves and spread that knowledge early but at the same time we wanted to be there to help them when they need help The positive thing about us not knowing too much about Perforce was that we could have a discussion with the team members where everyone really felt that both the students and we the coaches were on the same level and could learn from each other At the first meeting of our team we made a short introduction of Perforce and distributed a manual of the program that describes how it is
17. s 9 1 9 Useful links when learning more about Perforce http www perforce com perforce r14 1 manuals intro intro pdf http www perforce com perforce r14 1 manuals p4v gs p4v gs pdf 9 2 User manual 9 2 1 Hur h mtar jag Perforce till min hemkatalog Skriv dessa tre rader i terminalen cp R usr local cs EDAN10 Perforce cd chmod R 755 Perforce 9 2 2 Hur startar jag Perforce cd Perforce bin p4v amp 9 2 3 Hur skapar jag en anv ndare I Server skriver du in vm57 cs lth se 1666 Till h ger om User trycker du pa New och fyller i uppgifterna 9 2 4 Hur loggar jag in Server vm57 cs lth se 1666 User Ditt anvandarnamn Tryck OK 14 9 2 5 Ok jag r inloggad Now what Tryck p Connection i menyn V lj New Workspace Tryck p Browse till h ger om Workspace root och v lj en mapp som du vill anv nda som din lokala kopia av depot dvs ditt workspace Tryck p OK V lj Depot fliken om den inte r vald och tryck p Get Latest Revision knappen l ngt upp till v nster f r att h mta det som finns p depot ppna Eclipse och tryck p File Import General Existing Project into Workspace V lj samma root directory som Workspace root och importera projektet Enduro 9 2 6 Hj lp hj lp det fungerar inte Skicka ett mail till atf10dol student lu se eller datlloax student lu se s kommer vi inom 5 minuter Garanterat 15
18. s with rollback and branches but that can be the lack of expe rience and the approach of trial and error instead of gathering knowledge before trying The team have from this project gained a great experience with version control and we think that Perforce is a great tool for an inexperienced developer Thanks to the visual aspect of both merging and branching the developer can easily see what has happened The reader has to keep in mind that in a study with this few people the results can show something that could be interpreted wrong and therefore the conclusion might be misleading 7 1 Merging The results tend to point towards the fact that Perforce and git SVN perform typically the same when it comes to merging different versions of files We got a lot of good critique regarding merging in Perforce which is not shown in the diagram It could be that our team has easier to get started with merging on Perforce thanks to the visual client but when the other teams learn to handle merging on SVN they feel just as comfortable as our team with Perforce There were a few people in the team that expressed their love for the merging capabilities of Perforce and thought it was genius They found it very easy to use because of the interface P4V presents 7 2 Branching As mentioned before it is impossible to say anything for certain with too few people answering these questions Although if one is to take anything from this graph it could be that
19. used The manual that we had written assumed that the students had previous experience with version control and especially CVS The team studied the manual and by the first development session the team got its first hands on experiences with Perforce The first step was to set up Perforce and create a user Also to connect to our server and retrieve the depot that consisted of a skeleton that the team had created and the coaches implemented When that step was completed the team was up and running At the end of the development session that day the team had time to reflect on their first day The also reflected on how perforce was and what their struggles where All this was collected via a survey conducted by the coaches At the third planning meeting a decision was made by the team to start using branching We introduced branching for the team with some guidance from 9 Patterns were discussed with inspiration from Brad Appleton s branching patterns IT A decision was taken by the team that it was necessary to use a simple branching model because problems were encountered when everyone was submitting to the same branch The branching strategy was visualized with help of a version tree diagram as seen in Figure 2 At the third development session the team started to use branching for the first time fbugfix123 h I Figure 5 A sample version tree diagram for a project or system Figure 2 The figure shows a version tree diagram which
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