This is using Hudson 1.156 and the Perforce 1.0.5 plugin.

The problem here is that Perforce is keeping track of the revisions the workspace has. When the
workspace was sync'd with the latest in step #1, it will not download any more changes for step #3.

A possible work around would be to force the sync for step #3. However, that would cause the entire
project to be brought down every time. Not necessarily the most efficient way to do it. And, there is no
setting in the plugin to always force a sync.

I wonder if there is a way in the matrix build to copy the workspace from step #1 out to the
jdk/jdk1.5.0_13 directory when step #3 executes?

Marking this as WONTFIX because it is a symptom of behavior of the Perforce client. There isn't anything
we can do from the Hudson plugin's standpoint.

I've just noted the same behavior in this thread on the users mailing list:

http://www.nabble.com/Perforce-workspace-issues-in-matrix-project-td25198191.html

I don't understand how you can say this is just the behavior of Perforce and not
something you can fix. Hudson already has behavior specific to Perforce in
creating and managing custom Perforce workspaces, but in this instance it's
using them incorrectly. Hudson is trying to use the same Perforce workspace for
two different roots without re-syncing.

In the thread, I offered two solutions:

1) Don't run the main job on the same node/slave as the axis jobs – this would
also have the benefit of not blocking itself when there is only one executor on
a slave.

2) Create additional Perforce workspaces for the axis jobs – just as the main
job syncs to "workspace" and the axis jobs sync to "workspace/axis", the main
job could use Perforce workspace "x" and the axis jobs could use Perforce
workspace "x-axis".

Please reconsider this issue. Otherwise you should probably document on the
matrix feature that it is not inteded to work with Perforce.

Reassigning to issues@hudson as I no longer work on this project.

I saw other people asking for the ability to tie the parent matrix job to a
particular node in Issue 936, so I thought I'd try that as a workaround for this
issue as well. I just copied the "master/slave" section from the
AbstractItem/configure-common.jelly to the
MatrixProject/configure-entries.jelly, so that the "Tie this project to a node"
option would be exposed for Matrix projects as well. Then I tied the Matrix
project itself to my Master node, and for the axis I just selected two
"Individual Nodes" on other machines. It looks like it should be working now
– I see three progress bars in the "Build Executor Status" section as I would
expect. I can see from the logs that it is now using three distinct perforce
workspaces, but one of them still doesn't sync. Here are the relevant portions
of the build logs:

--------------------

Started by user anonymous
Building on master
Using master perforce client: experimental_boogaloo_4
[workspace] $ p4 workspace -o experimental_boogaloo_4
Changing P4 Client Root to: /home/cruise/hudson/jobs/experimental boogaloo
4/workspace/
Changing P4 Client View to: //cj/personal/jemmer/ExperimentalAndUtility/...
//experimental_boogaloo_4/...

Saving new client experimental_boogaloo_4
[workspace] $ p4 -s client -i
Last sync'd change: 95162
[workspace] $ p4 counter change
[workspace] $ p4 -s changes //experimental_boogaloo_4/...@95163,@95878
Sync'ing workspace to changelist 95878 (forcing sync of unchanged files).
[workspace] $ p4 sync -f //experimental_boogaloo_4/...@95878
Sync complete, took 5173 ms
Triggering build106_bugfix
Triggering build107_bugfix
Finished: FAILURE

--------------------

Started by upstream project "experimental boogaloo 4" build number 1
Building remotely on build106_bugfix
Using remote perforce client: experimental_boogaloo_4-build106
Changing P4 Client Root to: /home/cruise/hudson_bugfix/workspace/experimental
boogaloo 4/label/build106_bugfix/
Changing P4 Client View to: //cj/personal/jemmer/ExperimentalAndUtility/...
//experimental_boogaloo_4-build106/...

Saving new client experimental_boogaloo_4-build106
Last sync'd change: 0
Sync'ing workspace to changelist 95878.
Sync complete, took 68 ms
[maven output complaining that there's no pom.xml]
Finished: FAILURE

--------------------

Started by upstream project "experimental boogaloo 4" build number 1
Building remotely on build107_bugfix
Using remote perforce client: experimental_boogaloo_4-build107
Changing P4 Client Root to: /home/cruise/hudson_bugfix/workspace/experimental
boogaloo 4/label/build107_bugfix/
Changing P4 Client View to: //cj/personal/jemmer/ExperimentalAndUtility/...
//experimental_boogaloo_4-build107/...

Saving new client experimental_boogaloo_4-build107
Last sync'd change: 0
Sync'ing workspace to changelist 95878.
Sync complete, took 4880 ms
[maven output showing successful build]
Finished: SUCCESS

--------------------

If I go onto the 'build106' machine, which didn't sync anything to its
workspace, and issue the following command:

p4 -c experimental_boogaloo_4-build106 sync -n

It does report that it would add all the appropriate files.

So now I'm stumped and it seems my proposed workaround doesn't work and
something will indeed probably have to be done in the Perforce plugin itself.