P4 client alternatives

Getting ready to move the studio over to a new Maya, and with that comes the chance to revisit some of the annoyances of the current setup.

One of the thing that drives me bonkers is the fact that I can’t run the perforce client out of my distribution zip files. P4.pyd is a binary so it has to be extracted to somewhere on the python path, and potentially updated if versions changed, etc. It’s really not that bad but it does get me grumpy - particularly since the p4 api is so idiosyncratic and full of weird gotchas. Plus I may have to support macs, which will mean branching the binaries… ugh.

I don’t have any leeway not to use Perforce, but I’m wondering if there’s a pure-python alternative to the api’s given out by perforce. I’ve written my own p4 wrapper that issued commands via shells in the past, and it worked pretty well but doing a new one is a lot of work. I’ve found this and was wondering if anybody has experience with it or an alternative?

Once again, I recommend solving stuff like this by launching Maya (and most other tools) using a wrapper executable that configures the system environment variables etc. This lets you modify the python path at launch and put the .pyd wherever you want. You lose the ability to double click .ma files, but no one cares. The wrapper can be written in the language of your choice, including Python itself. Also, this lets people work on multiple projects on the same machine because their Maya/Tools environments are configured by the launcher, and almost nothing is set at the system level.

Just a gotcha for you to know; The biggest issue with having a wrapper exe is Pinning(right clicking on a application on the task-bar and choosing Pin ), this feature came in with Windows 7 and it completely goes around the wrapper :S Alternately you could monitor when Maya is loaded and kill it if it wasn’t run by the wrapper, but this method is painful.

we can pin our wrapper executables just fine… (they don’t have the official Maya icon, however).
running both a vanilla maya and a customized maya simulaneously is one of the benfits. we can isolate bugs in maya from our code very easily by firing up maya from the default shortcut.
we do occasionally have artists wonder why all the tools suddenly disappeared (they use the regular shortcut instead of the shortcut to the wrapper executable).

I’ve used the marshalling stuff from p4.exe and works pretty well. The tool you mention “looks” like its doing that so they may have done the work for you. If you dont want a pyd laying around then i think thats your only option

[QUOTE=rgkovach123;23398]we can pin our wrapper executables just fine… (they don’t have the official Maya icon, however).
running both a vanilla maya and a customized maya simulaneously is one of the benfits. we can isolate bugs in maya from our code very easily by firing up maya from the default shortcut.
we do occasionally have artists wonder why all the tools suddenly disappeared (they use the regular shortcut instead of the shortcut to the wrapper executable).[/QUOTE]

:S That is the other issue with Pinning… you pin the wrapper and then Maya appears next to the icon and can be pinned. :S I wish I knew how to stop windows from allowing you to pin applications.

Windose!!!

pinning applications is awesome though

Pinning Applications are awesome… just not when you want them not to be there. lol