"Reconcile Offline Work" in Perforce doesn't work for me

Question

In the 2009.1 version of Perforce Visual Client for 32-bin Windows, the "Reconcile Offline Work" option does weird things. In the middle box where the "Local files not in depot" should be displayed, I never get anything. What I do see is that the first time I reconcile a folder, it looks like perforce is filling the box with the "local files not in depot" because a list flashes quickly before my eyes. Then all of a sudden, the list quickly disappears into thin air and I'm left with an empty list. Does anyone know how I can get this feature to show me the files that I have not yet added? It seems like the "Modified files" and "Depot files missing from workspace" features work fine.

Also, as a side note, "Reconcile Offline Work" seemed to work fine in the 2009 beta version.

Answer 1

I had exactly the same problem.

The solution for me was obscure but trivial.

I simply changed the root directory of my client workspace from "C:\depot" to "c:\depot".

Yes, that's right, all I did was to change the drive letter from uppercase to lowercase. And, yes, I verified that changing the drive letter back to uppercase breaks it again and that changing the drive letter back to lowercase again fixes it again. So, this is not just a coincidence.

This is almost certainly a bug in the Perforce reconcile feature.

If you look closely at the reconcile paths, they all appear with a lowercase drive letter, even if you specify an uppercase drive letter, so my guess is that the matching algorithm is simply doing a case-sensitive comparison on the file paths. This is appropriate for everything but the drive letter. Their file lister probably always sets the drive letter to lowercase, so an uppercase drive letter on your client workspace root will never match.

Answer 2

This certainly sometimes happens. I seems the problem is likely to occur if I change the workspace view somehow and/or upgrade P4V to new version. So the solution which worked for me in the past was to trash the problematic workspace and create a new one (sometimes have to choose a different name too).

Perhaps deleting the .p4qt and .p4scc in your user home directory can help too.

Incidently, I did have a conversation with Perforce support on the related subject some time ago, and as the problems like this are very difficult to reproduce, therefore there wasn't much that they could do.