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Posts Tagged Perforce

Perforce Frills

Feb 19

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Programming | No Comments

I know I have not finished the 1.0 release of my EclipseFrills plug-in, but I have already started thinking about new frills. One set that I am really hot on right now are my Perforce plug-in frills. There are a few little additions that I have wanted to add to their plug-in that I am finally going to implement.

  • Create String Containing Changelist File Paths
  • Create a Working Set from Changelist
  • Add Search of Changelist Files
  • Ability to Shelve/Unshelve Changelist
  • Export files in Changelist

The big one is the “Shelving and Un-shelving of changes”. This is a feature present in IntelliJ and even Visual Studio, but it has been lacking in Eclipse. I will be implementing it at first for Perforce, and then I will look into doing the same for Subversion and maybe CVS. Basically my plan for implementing this is simple, use the changelist to determine the files that have been edited (different from repository) then pull the local content of those files off into a storage location (not yet determined) for later recovery. You would then be free to revert your changes (or perhaps the shelver will do it for you) and go on about your business. Later, you are free to unshelve your changes by integrating them back into the code (using the Eclipse diff tool).

This is all at the beginning stage right now; however, it is something that I have wanted to have for a while and have already come across multiple uses for so I have some need to finish it soon. The downside is that Perforce being a commercial product, I only have access to it at work so I will have to develop it off-hours remotely or something which will take longer.

Also, being that this plug-in relies on commercial products, it will have its own “feature” separate from the other frills, though it will be available from the same download site.

I hope to have the 1.0 version of the frills done soon and to have a beta version of some of Perforce frills functionality before too long.

Side Note: If these features already exist in Eclipse, please let me know. I was unable to find anything like them currently available.

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Perforce Eclipse Plug-in Issues

Oct 15

Posted by Christopher J. Stehno in Programming | No Comments

The Perforce integration plug-in for Eclipse seems to have some issues with Eclipse 3.3.x, which just came out a few weeks ago.

I have been using 3.3 since it was released along with the Perforce (most current version) plug-in, which I have been using for quite a while with no issues. After the upgrade, other developers I work with and I have started to have odd crashes. Eclipse would be working fine and then just die. The only things I could see in the log file (workspace/.meta/.log) were related to the perforce plug-in. The worst part was that the workspace became unloadable even when the .lock file was removed.

After fiddling around with it and still having issues. I upgraded to a clean Eclipse 3.3.1 installation with a minimum of extra plug-ins (I tend to accumulate plug-ins). I even shut down unused plug-ins that come with Eclipse (as a side note, this makes Eclipse run faster). I was able to work for about a week before it crashed again.

I found out that if you remove the perforce feature directory and plugins directories (not the top-level, but those specific to perforce) you can gain access to the workspace. From there you can reinstall the plug-in from the update manager and at least use it again until it crashes.

I submitted a bug report to Perforce and they said that they are already on the issue and that a new version with the fix will be coming out before the end of the year… hopefully a little sooner than that, but I know how software cycles can go. :-)

Another work-around – 11/01/2007

My contact at Perforce also told me that you can open a different workspace, disable the perforce plugin, restart in the desired workspace and then enable the plugin again. This seems to work as well and it is a little faster turn around time.

New Version in Beta – 2/13/2008

It looks like they have a new version currently in beta. Oddly enough I have found that if I create your project completely in Eclipse 3.3.x rather than importing an a project from an older Eclipse version, it works with no problems.

A friend of mine who now works for a different company actually had some face time with the Perforce plug-in developers and (on my request) asked them about whether there was any chance of them open-sourcing the plug-in. The answer was “no” due to some proprietary code in the plug-in. Oh well it was worth a try.

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