7. Submit

Changes that are made locally should be committed back to the Perforce server for safe keeping and so that others can access them. This is done via p4 submit. When you run this command, it will open up a submit template in an editor. FreeBSD has a custom template, and the important fields are described below:

Description:
        <enter description here>
        PR:
        Submitted by:
        Reviewed by:
        Approved by:
        Obtained from:
        MFP4 after:

It is good practice to provide at least 2-3 sentences that describe what the changes are that you are submitting. You should say what the change does, why it was done that way or what problem is solves, and what APIs it might change or other side effects it might have. This text should replace the <enter description here> line in the template. You should wrap your lines and start each line with a TAB. The tags below it are FreeBSD-specific and can be removed if not needed.

Files:

This is automatically populated with all of the files in your client that were marked in the add, delete, integrate, or edit states on the server. It is always a very good idea to review this list and remove files that might not be ready yet.

Once you save the editor session, the submit will happen to the server. This also means that the local copies of the submitted files will be copied back to the server. If anything goes wrong during this process, the submit will be aborted, and you will be notified that the submit has been turned into a changelist that must be corrected and re-submitted. Submits are atomic, so if one file fails, the entire submit is aborted.

Submits cannot be reverted, but they can be aborted while in the editor by exiting the editor without changing the Description text. Perforce will complain about this the first time you do it and will put you back in the editor. Exiting the editor the second time will abort the operation. Reverting a submitted change is very difficult and is best handled on a case-by-case basis.

All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/

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