Exchanging work before accurev promote

Question

My colleague and I are participating in a huge project located in Accurev. We've already created own workspaces backed with some stream (let's call it zzz-stream) which is used by many other participants, not only by us.

The point is that we want to exchange our work between our workspaces, make some changes, exchange again, etc. BEFORE making the changes accessible for others, i.e. in other words we don't want to propagate our changes until it is stable and tested, but we want be able to work on it together.

My idea was to create new stream (yyy-stream) backed with zzz-stream, and then change our workspaces to be backed with yyy-stream. But unfortunately I have no rights to create streams.

My second idea was to use a workspace as backed stream, but it doesn't work because Accurev can't use ws as backed stream.

Is there any solution for our problem?

UPD: I accepted Brad's answer as most detailed. However Accurev is too heavy and sluggish to be used effectively. So actually I prefer to use Git for internal needs over the accurev workspace. (see Accurev externally, git internally)

Answer 1

Your idea of creating the yyy-stream is the EXACT right way to do it. The other options are decent workarounds for one-off situations, but creating the extra stream is simple and is fully leveraging AccuRev's capabilities. That being said, I understand that your admins have stream creation locked down. They of course want control, but should be allowing for maximizing developer productivity and not forcing workarounds like this. My guess is they have stream creation locked down to a particular group being enforced by the server-admin trigger. One common thing I have seen other large sites do is: - allow streams to be freely created off of a list of acceptable streams (easy to do in the trigger) - enforce naming rules on the stream creation. This is important to admins in large sites to keep things organized. Again, this is very easy to enforce via the server-admin trigger.

Bottom line, if this is a common situation, work with the admins to allow this capability as per the above. If they have any questions, they are more than welcome to contact AccuRev and we will help them out.

Answer 2

Your idea on using another stream for you and your peer is a good one and is commonly called a collaboration stream. If your site has stream creation locked down, you would need to work with your AccuRev administrator to make that happen.

Another option is for you and the other developer to pull the keeps from the other workspace into your own stream. This relies on both of you being diligent about doing keeps and then you can look at the history of the other developer's workspace to find the keep operation, right-click that transaction and then select Send to Workspace. The destination workspace must be your own.

Answer 3

A third option (more for a situation where you are in your workspace and know exactly what file you want to grab the other users changes)is to bring up the version browser for the file, right click and select history/browse versions. Look for the other workspace, highlight the version in that workspace, right click and select send to workspace. This will checkout that version into your workspace.

This is similar to the change palette suggestion but quicker if your looking to this on a file basis.

Answer 4

Another idea is to use different version control system (e.g. git or svn) over Accurev workspace to exchange the changes and keep our history separated from zzz-stream. (similar to Accurev externally, git internally) Only changed files should be added to other VCS, not whole project. Some merge problems occur though.