Re: [git-p4] Trouble importing all perforce branches into git repository

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 11:35 AM, tumik [off-list ref] wrote:

Yes, I tried the git-p4raw too. Actually even several forks of it! But I
wasn't able to get any of those working, as none of them could load the
perforce database correctly. Maybe the perforce database has changed lately
or something, as git-p4raw gave errors that it's database tables don't have
as much columns as perforce's does. Tried also to change the code to add
those columns but there were so many of them and in many tables so I decided
it's too hard and time-consuming to start reverse-engineering them..

- tumik

I could maybe mention another approach: if your Perforce history isn't
too large so you can extract the info manually, or if you are able to
create a script to figure out your merges (changelist number, revision
of source and target branch in Perforce) it is easy to modify the git
history with this info afterwards.

You can add merge arrows to your git-p4 imported repository, either by
creating a .git/info/graft file and running git-filter-branch
afterwards (to make it permanent and distributable), or by using
git-replace. I may have a script somewhere that generates the graft
file from p4 changelist numbers and branch names, if you're
interested.

The graft + git-filter-branch is good for a one-time conversion, but
since it rewrites history it may not work well for branches that still
get updated in Perforce.

I have not tested git-replace myself, but it should be possible to use
this to add merge arrows too, without modifying the hashes of commits
later in the history. I'm not sure how well git-replace works with the
rest of git though.

Thomas