Upcoming Perforce Feature: Shelving

December 22nd, 2009 by Scott

Perforce announced on their blog that they have a new feature in beta testing called “shelve”. Great!

In short, “shelving” is taking a pending changelist and publishing it to the server without checking it into the depot.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this is one of the top features from git that was making me seriously consider checking it out. I started implementing this myself in my p4.exe wrapper, but I never gave it enough priority to get much work done. I’m excited to know that Perforce are adding it themselves. This is the first new feature I’ve seen from them in years that is worth upgrading for!

The things that interest me most about this ability are:

• Easy trading of in-progress work in a formal, server-supported way that is done out-of-band of the depot, so it cannot break the rest of the team. Good for code reviews, small tests, moving the same pending changes among multiple machines/clients, etc.
• Easy, incremental backup of works in progress. This is hot.
• Easy ability to temporarily put aside a local change in order to work on something else that collides (typically as an emergency). This eliminates the main reason I needed to use several P4 clients on the same machine.

I hope Crucible will have support for this great new feature after it’s released. That would eliminate most of the need for the tool I wrote.

I’m looking forward to seeing this new feature in 2010.

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