Sharing code between different projects?

[andrea crotti]

2012/8/14 Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>:
>
> Having just skimmed this thread, one thing I haven't quite seen suggested is
> this:
>
> Really do make a third "utilities" project, and treat "the project" and
> "deploy" as separate notions. So to actually run/deploy project A's code
> you'd have a short script that copied project A and the utilities project
> code into a tree and ran off that. Or even a simple process/script to
> update the copy of "utilities" in "project A"'s area.
>
> So you don't "share" code on an even handed basis but import the
> "utilities" library into each project as needed.
>
> I do this (one my own very small scale) in one of two ways:
>
>   - as needed, copy the desired revision of utilities into the project's
>     library space and do perforce's equivalent of Mercurial's addremove
>     on that library tree (comment "update utilities to revision X").
>
>   - keep a perforce work area for the utilities in your project A area,
>     where your working project A can hook into it with a symlink or some
>     deploy/copy procedure as suggested above.
>     With this latter one you can push back into the utilities library
>     from your "live" project, because you have a real checkout. So:
>
>       projectAdir
>         projectA-perforce-checkout
>         utilities-perforce-checkout
>       projectBdir
>         projectB-perforce-checkout
>         utilities-perforce-checkout
>

Thanks, is more or less what I was going to do..  But I would not use
symlinks and similar things, because then every user should set it up
accordingly.

Potentially we could instead use the perforce API to change the
workspace mappings at run-time, and thus "force" perforce to checkout
the files in the right place..

There is still the problem that people should checkout things from two
places all the time instead of one..

> Personally I become more and more resistent to cut/paste even for small
> things as soon as multiple people use it; you will never get to backport
> updates to even trivial code to all the copies.
>
> Cheers,


Well sure, but on the other end as soon as multiple people use it you
can't change any of the public functions signatures without being
afraid that you'll break something..