We use Perforce at Splunk, and it’s worked out pretty well for us. I’m a CVS admin at heart, and I know there’s some SVN sentiment, but p4 gives us a nice mix of atomic commits, attractive GUI and command-line tools, and someone to call for help if it ever completely eats itself.

Over time I’ve compiled a small library of scripts for various p4 functions that have been written time and again at different sites…mergetool is one of them. This little tool accepts a merge target (”yours” in p4-speak) and projectile (”theirs” in p4), labels both, performs an integrate, and performs a “safe” resolve -as. It logs any failures for you to resolve by hand, or submits the change set if the resolve completes successfully. It does this with a bunch of logging in a well-organized, date-stamped directory suitable for archiving (or splunking).

Splunk runs on a lot of platforms for a relatively young product and that number is always increasing. The day I started, there were packages for Intel and PowerPC Macintoshes, i686 Linux, Solaris 8 on Sparc, and FreeBSD on x86, all created with BitRock InstallBuilder, run from a simple shell script, usually by Erik. There really wasn’t much control over what went into the installer — if a file was in the installer prep directory and the shell script didn’t know to delete it, out it went.

By the time 2.1 was on its way, we’d decided to switch to native packages, and our list of platforms had expanded to include Solaris on Intel, with several more on the horizon. We also wanted to provide the “rail tarball” distribution we continue to support, in part so that QA could get started before the packaging automation was complete.