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Title: 2015.2 Streams Enhancements, Part One

The 2015.2 release includes a bunch of enhancements for streams.  Today I'll talk about a few of the relatively small ones:

	#1052310, 1009333 (Bug #50432) **
	    Add the ability to root streams at a deeper level in the depot
	    directory hierarchy.  New stream depots contain the 'StreamDepth'
	    field for defining the root level of a stream's path (the number
	    of slashes found within the stream's Stream field) below the
	    depot name. This field accepts a value between one and 10, while
	    it defaults to one.

Since streams were first implemented, one of the most common requests has been a way to create directory structures with streams within a single stream depot; historically streams have always had to have names of the form //DEPOTNAME/SOMETHING.  As of 2015.2, all of the streams in a particular depot continue to follow a naming convention, but now the naming convention is configurable per depot, so you can define a stream depot with a depth of //DEPOTNAME/1/2/3 to create a deeper directory structure within that depot.

 	#1039642 (Bug #77628) **
 	    'p4 switch' now supports switching to a point-in-time stream.
 	    By specifying 'p4 switch stream@change' the command will set
 	    the stream spec/view creation as of that change and sync any
 	    files also to the change specified.

This is a small piece of syntactic sugar that makes it easier to use the existing StreamAtChange field in the client spec, by allowing it to be specified as part of the "p4 switch" command line.  Since "p4 switch" syncs the files as well as setting up the client view, this makes "p4 switch stream@change" a one-step way to sync your client to a historical version of a stream.

	#1100312 (Bug #79497) **
	    The 'p4 stream' and 'p4 stream -o' commands now default to
	    the current client's stream if no stream name is specified.

Another piece of syntactic sugar to make working with streams a little bit easier -- if your current client has an associated stream, you can now view that stream spec by running "p4 stream -o" with no arguments, and edit it with "p4 stream", much like you would use "p4 client -o" and "p4 client" with a "classic" client.

	#1029470 (Bugs #72671, #76543) **
	    Names of automatic labels can now be used as specifiers in import
	    mappings on stream specs and in the 'ChangeView' on client specs.

This is an oft-requested minor extension to the import @change/ChangeView feature, being able to specify a label in place of a changelist number.  This is only meant to be used with labels that are themselves aliases for changelists; to set up one of these labels, clear the label's View field and enter "@CHANGELIST" in the Revision field.

Stay tuned for my next blog post wherein I'll talk about the really big new streams feature for 2015.2...