Managing the Perforce spec depot

The spec depot, if present, tracks changes to user-edited forms such as client workspace specifications, jobs, branch mappings, and so on.  There can be only one spec depot per server.

Perforce IPLM will create and manage client specs, and update them based on the resources used in Perforce IPLM workspaces. PWM will also create the client specs for items stored in the cache. Depending on the number of clients stored the spec depot might grow large, and adversely affect perforce performance. 

After you have created the spec depot, use p4 admin updatespecdepot to pre-populate it with current set of client, depot, branch, label, typemap, group, user, and job forms. For more information about setting up a spec depot, see the Helix Versioning Engine Administrator Guide: Fundamentals.

For spec depots, the SpecMap: field can be used to control which specs are versioned. By default, all specs (//spec/...) are versioned. To exclude the protections table from versioning, configure the spec depot’s SpecMap: as follows:

SpecMap:
	//spec/...
	-//spec/protect/...

Adding or changing the spec mapping only affects future updates to the spec depot; files already stored in the spec depot are unaffected.

Perforce IPLM workspace clients, PWM generated clients and IPLM Cache generated clients can be disabled as follows:

SpecMap:
	//spec/...
	-//spec/client/ws:*
	-//spec/client/share:*
    -//spec/client/PiCache:* 

If you are using a system like git-fusion then these client specs can also be excluded when perforce performance is affected:

SpecMap:
	//spec/...
	-//spec/client/git-fusion*