How to retrieve a directory tree from perforce.freebsd.org?

[Kris Kennaway]

Mel wrote:
> On Friday 31 August 2007 19:50:19 Howard Goldstein wrote:
>> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>> Manolis Kiagias wrote:
>>>> Howard Goldstein wrote:
>>>>> As the subject says, is there a straightforward way to retrieve a
>>>>> directory tree from perforce.freebsd.org?  Clicking individual files in
>>>>> the web interface is really tedious.
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>>>> It seems the required software for accessing perforce repositories is
>>>> available in ports:
>>>>
>>>> /usr/ports/devel/perforce
>>>>
>>>> I haven't tried it myself though. I don't even know if
>>>> perforce.freebsd.org allows anonymous access.  You can however read some
>>>> details on it here:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/p4-primer/index.html
>>>>
>>>> If you do try, it please send a follow up post with results.
>>>>
>>>>
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>>> No, it doesn't allow anonymous access (this isn't feasible due to the
>>> way perforce works, i.e. maintaining all client state on the server).
>>> I dont know of a way to extract a general perforce tree, although a
>>> few of them (like trustedbsd) are exported via cvsup on I think
>>> cvsup9.  I think you will have to ask whoever's branch you are looking
>>> at for a copy of it.
>> Dang. Like an idiot savant, perforce appears to be (channeling Yoda I
>> am?)  Time for a script to workaround perforce's needlessly overcomplex
>> stupidity.  Thanks for letting me know I'm beating my head against the
>> wall with the out-of-box tools...binary only at that.
> 
> I assume that since sources in perforce is work-in-progress that may or not 
> become official work-in-progress (-current), download complexity is a plus.
> 

perforce just isn't intended for this purpose, it's meant for internal 
use within a (closed) organisation.  As great as it is for development 
with large numbers of branches, this is one of the important technical 
reasons why it's not suitable for primary FreeBSD distribution.

In principle the web front end could offer this kind of aggregation of 
files from a branch, maybe you should raise it as a feature request with 
perforce.com.

Kris