Fwd: git p4: feature request - branch check filtering

Hi,

I'm unable to find a similar issue, and if it's raised on the mailing list I apologize.

I work at a company that has recently moved all CVS, SVN, and git repositories to Perforce. Depots have not been setup correctly in every case, and there is one depot that contains literally hundreds of projects under commercial development (and hundreds of branches as a result)

My project may be in //stupid_depot/commercial/teamporter/rok. This is the path I clone with git-p4. The only branches in this depot that contain files at this path are titled as 'rok_porter_branch/release_1.x' or similar.

When using '--detect-branches' git-p4 checks each key of branches to see if any of them have files in the path I've cloned. Whilst this is good in practice there is unfortunately 6,809 branches, git-p4 processes about 2 a second and just under an hour to perform any git-p4 rebase, submit, or similar operation.

I propose the addition of a branch list filtering option (--filter-branches) that takes either a regular expression or list of branches it should check. This may be useful in sane situations where you don't want to scan every branch in a Perforce repository, or blacklist branches that have undesirable content (for example, one of the branches is called 'svn-backup'. It contains a single, multi-GB tarball.)

It would be ideal to have this information (after initial clone or sync) stored somewhere in the git config where is appropriate so that future submit/rebase operations adhere to this list.

Has something like this been worked on, or has been considered in the past? If not I will consider implementing this after reading up on the Git code guidelines.

Thanks for keeping the Git workflow accessible in painful areas.

Dan