| Home
| Previous
| Next
| Up

### Setting up your client mapping

Once you are able to connect, you need to set up your client mapping since by default it will be empty. The client space is what allows you to map in only the portions of the software repository that you care about, and where to put them on your local system. The client information is then stored remotely on our server so it knows what files you have on your system and where they live (so if you delete stuff manually you will need to do a forced sync!).

To set up your client mapping, type:

p4 client

which will bring you into your editor of choice. It will include comments at the top about what parts of the file are used for what. There are two parts that you need to modify; the 'root' definition and the 'view' definition. The 'root' field is the root directory where all files get checked out onto your system, and this should be the root of the scitech directory (ie: /home/KendallB/scitech is where I put the sources on Unix systems, or c:\scitech for DOS, Windows and OS/2 systems). For example:

Root: /home/KendallB/scitech

The 'options' field defines what options are in effect for that client. The most important one you will want to change is the 'nocompress' option to 'compress'. By enabling compression, you will drastically reduce the time required for syncs over an internet connection! The second most useful option is to change the ‘normdir’ option to ‘rmdir’. This will have Perforce remove empty directories from the file system when all the files managed by Perforce are deleted and the directory is empty.

The 'view' field defines what parts of the perforce repository you want mapped to your local drive. The simplest mapping will pull down all the source files you would need (and the one you should probably use) would be:

View:
//depot/gpl/... //YOURNAME_YOURMACHINE_YOUROS/...

where you would replace the YOURNAME_YOURMACHINE_YOUROS above with the name of your client. This line indicates that all files and directories get mapped to the root of the client (or /home/KendallB/scitech if you uses the above root field). Now once you have the client view defined, exit your editor and it will send the changes to the perforce server.

Copyright © 2002 SciTech Software, Inc. Visit our web site at http://www.scitechsoft.com