Frequently Asked Questions

How do I download projects from the Public Depot? Do I need a registered account?

You do not need a registered account to download anything from the Public Depot.

Most project pages will have convenient links that you can click to download relevant project files. If a project does not have a wiki page yet but you know what depot guest branch it's in, you can use P4Web to look for it on the web, or you can browse for it with any Perforce client application running on your machine, using the sync command to download files.

See How to Browse for more information on browsing the Public Depot.

How do I track changes to a project I am interested in?

There are two ways to track changes to projects that interest you.

If you prefer RSS feeds, the P4Web that runs against the Public Depot Perforce server can generate RSS feeds of change history for any path in the depot. To get the RSS feed for a given path in P4Web:

1. In the files tab of P4Web, browse to the path you are interested in by clicking the path links
2. At the top of the window click on the Submitted tab
3. The RSS feed link will be on the right side of the window, close to the top

If you prefer email, you can get change notifications via the review daemon that runs against the Public Depot. To setup email review for a given path:

1. In your favorite Perforce client, open up your user specification. In P4V you can edit the current user by going to Connection | Edit Current User... in the menu. From the command line run p4 user.
2. In the reviews field enter the paths you are interested in, one per line. For example if you wanted to setup reviews for all guest branches you would use //guest/.... All standard Perforce wildcards are usable in review paths.

RSS feeds and a list of recent changes can also frequently be found on the project page for any given project.

Where is my guest branch? I can't find it.

When you register for the Public Depot you are given write permission to the path "//guest/your_name/...", but until you add files to this path, it won't show up in the depot.

The guest branch directory will be created automatically as soon as you've added files to it. See Adding Files in the P4 User's Guide for more information on adding files to a Perforce depot.

How do I work on a project in someone else's guest branch?

You only have write permissions to your own guest branch, but you can integrate anything into it that you can read, which is everything in the //public and //guest depots). This means that you can integrate a project from another user's guest branch into your own and make any edits to it that you like without impacting the other user's files.

If someone else has been working on one of your projects in their guest branch and you like their changes, you can integrate from their branch back into your branch to merge the changes together.

How do I add a page to a category?

Add the following text to the page:

[[Category:CATEGORY NAME]]

When you save or preview the page, you will see the new category listed in the category links box at the bottom of the page. If it's a new category, the link will be in red to indicate that the linked page does not exist yet.

It is usually better to add a page to an existing general category than to create a new category that contains only one or two pages.

If you do add a new category, make sure to in turn add your new category to an existing category that it is a subset of. For example, suppose that you've written a handful of Half-Life mods for Perforce, and you want to create a new category to put them all under; you might create a new category called "Perforce Half-Life modifications". You would then click on the link to this new category to edit it and add the text [[Category:Perforce integrations]] to make your new category a subcategory under Category:Perforce integrations.

See Help:Categories at mediawiki.org for more information on MediaWiki categories.

How do I use templates?

Templates are special MediaWiki pages that can be included in other pages. They're handy for centralizing frequently used and/or complex page elements. Some templates can accept parameters (like a function in a programming language) that affect their output; simpler templates do not accept parameters and always produce the same output.

The syntax for using a template is:

{{TemplateName|param1|param2|...}}

The template's output will be automatically placed into the page at the point where the template was used.

We have created a number of templates designed to make creating project pages easier. Most of these templates, particularly the complex ones, will have usage information on the template page itself. See Template:Project for an example. The project page boilerplate in the How to Contribute page consists mostly of templates that create common project page elements when given important pieces of project information as parameters.

Although using templates that we've made makes a lot of things easier, you're also free to make pages entirely from scratch, or to make your own templates. Most of our templates are protected so that they can't be edited, but you can see how they're implemented by going to the template pages and clicking "view source".

See Help:Templates at mediawiki.org for more information on MediaWiki templates.

How do I make my page look like this other one?

If you see a project page that you like the look of and you want your own project pages to emulate it, you can view the source by clicking the edit link (or view source if it's a protected page). This will show you all of the markup, templates, et cetera that the page uses, which will make it easy to mimic the layout in your pages. Alternatively, you can just copy and paste it into your page (changing all of the relevant details, of course).

If you get stuck on what exactly a particular piece of wiki markup means, refer to the help pages at mediawiki.org. If you're having trouble with a particular template, you can go directly to that template's page to see if there are any usage notes (or view its source if necessary). Links to the templates used in a page are displayed whenever you view that page's source.