Perforce - how to allow users without checkin privileges to submit patches

Question

Our team uses Perforce for revision control. We'd like to be able to accept patches from folks outside our team (e.g. support engineers) without giving them full privileges to check in code, like the way that open-source projects are willing to accept code from anyone but give full commit privileges to only a few people.

Other source-control systems (e.g. SVN, GIT) make this pretty easy because anyone can create a local branch, make changes, and generate a patch using basic command-line or GUI tools (e.g. Tortoise).

But I'm new to Perforce and don't know if there's an analogous way to do this.

Can anyone recommend a best practice? (ideally it would work with P4V on Windows since that's what our external contributors are likely to be using)

Answer 1

You could setup a contributor branch on your server with the correct access rights. Then when the patch is committed to perforce, you integrate to your main branch. The commit rights to the branch isolate you from the main branch.

Of course, this means you have to maintain a branch for the support engineers, and give them external access to the perforce server.

There may be another solution in Remote Depots, but have not checked into that.