Any way to avoid "renegades" when copying en masse

[erich666]

We're a remote site working on a large project. We use SOS to stay in synch with the mainstream code, which is located on a server on the other coast.

To get the few file changes that happen in a day, we normally "Get latest version" on a few directories (each of which has many subdirectories). This is much snappier than VSS, but can take a solid hour of clicking, waiting, clicking again, waiting, etc. (So one quick sub-question: is there a way to do "Get latest version" from a set of directories, instead of having to click through each one?)

One resource we have available to us, but is rarely used, is a ZIP file of the entire codestream, which is grabbed from VSS and produced each night by the build server and put on a local server here. In theory you can simply grab this file (very quick), unzip it into your directories, and you now have the latest code. The reason no one uses this (much faster) way to update their code is because of SOS's "renegade" status feature. By using the ZIP, the files will all have different fetch dates than what our SOS server has for each user, so SOS will call them all renegades. Worse yet, if you now try to synch from SOS, you'll end up getting all the files, instead of the few files that have actually changed - this chews up a good part of a day, losing any savings from getting the ZIP.

The renegade feature in SOS is useful to us, it points out files that are different than the mainstream. However, it also makes updating today's build in two minutes using a ZIP file vs. one hour using SOS not viable.

Is there a workaround to this conflict? E.g. can you overlay a bunch of files from some other source onto your client machine and then tell SOS that it's really OK, none of these files are renegades, despite the fact that the fetch time doesn't match?

Any ideas appreciated - a solution would save our group alone about a man-day a day.

Eric Haines
Autodesk Inc.

[lbauer]

I'm not sure that these suggestions will speed things up, but you can try them:

1. If you do a recursive Get Latest, SOS will do a get of the folder and all its subfolders without you having to click through to find the out of date files. Although SOS may take some time to retrieve the file lists, it will only retrieve those files which have changed. There's an option in the SOS GUI Client under Tools->Options->General to act on projects recursively.

2. If you put all the new files from your Zip archive into your working directories, then change working directories temporarily and then change back, the file status will be Unknown instead of Renegade. For this to work, check "Use Checksums to determine 'Unknown" file status'."

Refresh the file list and your Unknow status should change to blank.

You might want to turn off checksums after this operation, as it can slow down SOS.