What are the advantages/disadvantages of perforce “jobs” over an external bug tracking system?

Question

I am trying to understand what perforce “jobs” provide over an external bug tracking system and just putting the bug ID in the check-in comment.

I was hoping that "job" could help with How do I see if a branch contains a bug fix in Perforce?

Answer 1

Nothing. Take it from someone who endured years of aggravation working with the Perforce/FogBugz integration mechanisms (the latest being the Perforce Defect Tracking Gateway which uses Perforce jobs as part of the integration). They provide very little return on a significant investment in time setting them up and then trying to figure what went wrong when they stop working (which is often).

I now do just what you suggest. I simply put the FogBugz case number in the Perforce check-in comment, then add that Perforce changelist number to the FogBugz case upon resolving it. As simple and reliable as it gets.

Answer 2

We put the issue ID in the comment but also have a Perforce trigger that updates the issue database (JIRA) with the changelist number. During the next build the automated build process also updates the issue with the actual build number.

A very nice part of this implantation is that the trigger gives an error if the issue is not marked as in progress or the developer doing the check-in is not working on the issue. Therefore it is uncommon for a miss-typed issues ID number to get past the checks.