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P4 Distributed Versioning Documentation | 2025.1

# Track a changelist’s identity from server to server

As described earlier, a changelist gets renumbered each time it gets fetched, pushed, or unzipped; as a result, it quickly becomes difficult to determine which changelist is which across a series of servers. Changelist 12 on one server might not be the same as changelist 12 on another server.

P4 Server includes a global changelist ID feature which allows you to assign to a changelist a permanent ID that remains the same from server to server. This is an opt-in feature. There are two workflows for enabling global changelist IDs. They are summarized in the following subsections:

## Workflow 1: Let P4 Server generate global changelist IDs

The majority of P4 Server users will likely choose to have global changelist IDs system-generated.

To have P4 Server generate the IDs for you, follow these steps:

On a personal server:

1. Run the `p4 configure` command to set `submit.identity` to whichever of the three possible formats you prefer:

   - uuid: a universally-unique identifier
   - checksum: a checksum
   - serverid: a combination of the serverid + changelist number

   This causes P4 Server to generate a global changelist ID and write it to the `Identity` field of the change spec for the changelist in question, each time a change is submitted. For more information, see the description of the `submit.identity` configurable in the Configurables chapter of the P4 CLI Reference.

2. Run `p4 submit` to submit the changelist. Once you’ve done this, the changelist ID appears in the `Identity` field of the change spec.
3. Run `p4 describe changelistnumber` to find out what changelist ID was generated.

## Workflow 2: Enter global changelist ID manually

Choose this workflow if you want to customize your global changelist ID names. For example, you might want to name a changelist according to the bug it corresponds to in your bug database.

On a personal server:

1. Run `p4 submit` to submit your changelist.
2. Edit the change spec to set the value of the `Identity` field to the desired value.
3. Run the `p4 push`, `p4 fetch`, or `p4 unzip` command.

On the shared server:

- Run `p4 describe -I changelistID` to retrieve the changelist number of the changelist that was pushed, fetched, or unzipped.

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