Why I Hate Perforce: 3. It's hard to find files that need adding

This is part of a series of articles explaining why I hate Perforce. Please see "Why I Hate Perforce: The Background" first.

When adding new files to a working tree it is of paramount importance that these files get checked into the revision control system at the correct point. The difficult part is finding the files that need adding - once that's been done adding them is easy.

Finding new files is made difficult because working trees usually contain a lot of other files that shouldn't be added to revision control: editor backup files, files generated during compilation, backup modified versions of files that are under revision control that you want to keep around as reminders, temporary files that haven't been cleaned up properly. It's difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Other revision control systems solve this problem by allowing such files to be added to ignore lists. Usually there's a global ignore list for files that are almost always ignored such as object files and editor backup files. In addition there's a specific ignore list for each directory; this is useful for generated header files and patterns that would otherwise be too broad. CVS uses a file named .cvsignore and Git uses the similar .gitignore. Subversion uses a directory property named svn:ignore.

Perforce has no equivalent to this functionality. The Eclipse Perforce plugin seems to have invented the concept of a .p4ignore file out of necessity but I haven't tried it.

My currently suboptimal workaround for this is a script that runs find(1) and passes the results to p4 fstat to identify files that aren't under control then weeds out common files that should be ignored. I've got parts of an improved Ruby version of this script working but haven't yet polished it enough for release.

Now read Part Four.