How to set defaults for perforce client specs

Question

I'm trying to discover how to change the default set of Client Spec options and submit-options.

set P4CLIENT=my_new_client_1
p4 client

Gives me the following spec default-spec:

Client: my_new_client_1
...
Options:    noallwrite noclobber nocompress unlocked nomodtime normdir

SubmitOptions:  submitunchanged
...

Now on my machine i want to always use revertunchanged, rmdir for example, but it seems like I need remember to manually set this everytime I create a new client.

Is there any way to achieve this? p4 set seems to only affect the things that can be set by environment variables.

Answer 1

You can't change the default client spec template (unless you're the Perforce system administrator) but you can set up and use your own template. You would first create a dummy client with a client spec that has the values that you want:

Client: my_template_client
...
Options:    noallwrite noclobber nocompress unlocked nomodtime rmdir

SubmitOptions:  revertunchanged
...

Then you just specify that the dummy client should be used as a template when creating new clients:

p4 client -t my_template_client my_new_client_1

Answer 2

The first response here was incorrect:

You CAN create a default clientspec in Perforce using triggers.

Essentially, you create a script that runs on the server and runs whenever someone does a form-out on the form client. This script would have to check to see if the clientspec already exists, and then substitute a sensible "default" if it doesn't (if it's a new clientspec).

Note that this works fine and well, and it's even in the P4 SysAdmin Guide (the exact example you're looking for is there!) but it can be a bit difficult to debug, as triggers run on the SERVER, not on the client!

Manual: http://www.perforce.com/perforce/r10.1/manuals/p4sag/06_scripting.html

Specific Case Example: http://www.perforce.com/perforce/r10.1/manuals/p4sag/06_scripting.html#1057213