Showing Perforce changelists submitted since last sync

Question

Before I sync my Perforce client in the morning, I'd like to read the diffs and log messages for any changelists that will affect me. Unfortunately, though, I can't find a simple way to list such changelists using either p4 changes or P4V. I suspect I'm missing something simple, though.

Is there a way that I can list all the changelists submitted since I last sync'ed my client? If I can get the full descriptions and diffs from previous depot revisions, as p4 describe does for a single changelist, that would be even better.

Answer 1

The simple answer is:

p4 changes -l "...#>have"

You need the quotes to avoid your shell doing redirection.

You can trivially iterate over the changes and call "p4 describe" on each one.

You can get a full diff by using "p4 diff2" (assuming you want a unidiff):

p4 diff2 -du ...#have ...#head

But that doesn't give you a per-changelist diff.

Answer 2

Beware!

p4 changes "...#>have"

does not list changelists that contain only new/added files.

Your best bet is to cache the last sync point, something like

HEAD=`p4 counter change`
if [ -f lastbuild.txt ]
then
  OLDHEAD=`cat lastbuild.txt`
else
  OLDHEAD=`p4 changes -m1 ...#have`
  echo lastbuild.txt not found!  I will guess that your last sync was @$OLDHEAD
fi
p4 changes ...@$OLDHEAD,$HEAD > changes.txt
# -snip- review changes.txt, perhaps prompt "Continue with sync to $HEAD?"
p4 sync ...@$HEAD
echo $HEAD > lastbuild.txt

With this method you will get false positives if you have submitted or cherry-pick-synced any changelists since the last time you updated the sync point cache, but it's better to list an extra changelist for review than to miss one, especially one containing all new code.

---

Don't try this at home

For posterity, here are a couple other things I've tried in the past that ultimately failed:

p4 changes ...#have > have.txt
p4 changes ...#head > head.txt
diff have.txt head.txt

covers the case of changelists containing all adds, but the final output falsely includes older changelists for files that are deleted at #have. Also perf can be pretty bad if you have a lot of history in the depot.

p4 sync -n ... | cut -f1 -d' ' | p4 -x- changes -m1 | sort | uniq

gets pretty close, but fails to list older changelists if a file has been edited multiple times since you last synced. It's also hitting the depot once for every file that will sync, so perf can be really poor.