Perforce: Any side-effects to sharing Login accounts / Client-Specs among multiple users?

I am currently working on a file system application in C# that requires users to login to a Perforce server.

During our analysis, we figured that having unique P4 login accounts per user is not really beneficial and would require us to purchase more licenses.

Considering that these users are contractual and will only use the system for a predefined amount of time, it's hard to justify purchasing licenses for each new contractual user.

With that said, are there any disadvantages to having "group" of users share one common Login account to a Perforce server ? For example, we'd have X groups who share X logins.

From a client-spec point-of-view, will Perforce be able开发者_如何学编程 to detect that even though someone synced to head, the newly logged user (who's on another machine), also needs to sync to head ? Or are all files flagged as synced to head since someone else synced already ?

Thanks

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The client specs are per machine, and so will work in the scenario you give.

However, Perforce licenses are strictly per person, and so you will be breaking the license deal and using the software illegally. I really would not advocate that.

In addition to the 'real' people you need licenses for, you can ask for a couple of free 'robot' accounts to support things like automatic build services, admin etc.

Perforce have had arrangements in the past for licensing of temporary users such as interns, and so what I would recommend is you contact them and ask what they can do for you in your situation.

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Greg has an excellent answer and you should follow his directions first. But I would like to make a point on the technical side of sharing clients on multiple machines. This is generally a bad idea. Perforce keeps track of the contents of each client by client name only. So if you sync a client on one machine, and then try to sync the same client on another machine, then the other machine will only get the "recently" changed files and none of the changes that were synced on the first machine.

The result of this is that you have to do a lot of force syncing. Or keep track of the changelists you sync to and do some flushing and then syncing.