git to p4 conversion

Hi,

My company is introducing perforce, and the policy is that all source codes should be kept there.

I have some small (and flat) git repos, which I would like to migrate into a perforce depot keeping their histories. I tried git-p4 without any success, and I did not find a good manual for it.

Is there any step-by-step tutorial out there? Is there any living human who ever made a successful conversion in this direction?

Thanks for your help in advance.

Endre Czirbesz

On 03/02/11 05:52, Endre Czirbesz wrote:

What exactly did you try?

Theoretically, you could clone your new, empty, company-mandated p4 tree into a fresh git repo, get your existing code onto a new branch in this fresh repo (it's already in git, right, so that should be easy), then use 'git-p4 submit' to submit that branch back to p4.

I'm not aware of an existing tutorial for this, sorry

-i

Hello Ian,

Thanks for your reply.

2011/2/3 Ian Wienand <ianw@vmware.com>:

I am not at my work computer now, but as I remember:

cd workdir git-p4 clone //depot/projectdir/...@all . git clone myprojectrepo .

(Everything went fine till this point.)

git-p4 sync git-p4 submit Fatal error...

I don't remember the exact message, but it tried to reach a non-existing git commit (HEAD~xx, where xx was count of my commits, so it tried to refer to a commit before my initial commit). I tried to change the order of the clone steps, but the result was the same.

Rgds,

Endre

Hi Endre,

Endre Czirbesz <endre <at> czirbesz.hu> writes:

I think what you should do is add the git repository as a remote with something like:

git remote add remotename myprojectrepo git pull remotename master git p4 submit

Hope this helps, Vitor

[on this mailing list, please don't cull the CC list]

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 1:03 AM, Vitor Antunes <vitor.hda@gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

That's not what I would do... When I try this, the 'git pull ...' creates a merge, which I don't want to do when using git-p4.

But I think we're close to something that would work ok:

Endre, you should start like you already have; by git-p4 cloning your project from perforce. (You maybe want to have a dummy file checked in to your <projectdir> in perforce, so that the 'git-p4 clone' command produces at least one commit in your git repo)...

Then, do 'git remote add tempremote <path-to-your-existing-git-repo>' like Vitor suggests.

At this point I would do:

$ git checkout -b tempbranch tempremote/master $ git rebase master $ git-p4 submit

So, the 'git rebase master' should be like applying each of your existing git commits *on-top-of* the git-p4 branch that you already have. And that is the key to git-p4 knowing what to push to the perforce server.

Thus, if I wanted to get all my existing git history into perforce, this is how I would do it.

    -- Tor Arvid

Hi All,

Thanks for the replies.

2011/2/4 Tor Arvid Lund <torarvid@gmail.com>:

At this point I got an error message: fatal: git checkout: updating paths is incompatible with switching branches.

So I fetched my tempremote first: $ git fetch tempremote $ git checkout -b tempbranch tempremote/master (I got a warning from fetch, that there are no common commits, but I supposed that it is right. :) )

It applied all my commits.

  Synchronizing p4 checkout...
  ... - file(s) up-to-date.
  Applying 1##############################9 Initial commit
  error: ***: already exists in working directory
[...]
  Unfortunately applying the change failed!

It said this error for all my files. :( But I think we are almost there. :)

Regards,

Endre

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 11:49 AM, Endre Czirbesz <endre@czirbesz.hu> wrote:

See, this is what happens when I write a "how-to" and not actually try it out before sending it... Obviously, you are correct in that you have to fetch it before being able to check it out :-)

That is correct.

Again, if only I'd tried it myself first! ;)

Well, I can get it to work if I do: $ git p4 sync

before the 'git p4 submit'.

Try that, and see if it works for you. (BTW, when committing half-works, and then fails, oftentimes you need to do a bit of cleanup in perforce... Revert files, manually remove files created by git inside your p4 clientspec root directory, that sort of thing...)

    -- Tor Arvid

2011/2/4 Tor Arvid Lund <torarvid@gmail.com>:

Same result. :(

My current workflow is:

$ rm -rf projdir $ git-p4 clone //depot/projdir/...@all $ cd projdir $ git remote add gitremote endre@gitserver/gitrepo.git $ git fetch -q gitremote $ git checkout -b tempbranch gitremote/master $ git rebase -q master $ git-p4 sync $ git-p4 submit

The result is still tons of file already exists in working directory messages.

I dropped the whole directory, and then recreated it, I do not know any better 'cleanup'. :)

Rgds,

Endre

Hi Vitor,

2011/2/4 Vitor Antunes <vitor.hda@gmail.com>:

It is almost the same in my case. :) My p4 client root is ~/work/, my project dir is ~/work/projdir (and at the moment this is the only directory within ~/work/), and I dropped the latter. And then it was created again by git-p4 clone.

I can drop the workspace root, but I do not think it would help.

Regards,

Endre

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 5:52 PM, Endre Czirbesz <endre@czirbesz.hu> wrote:

I... wonder if we're maybe talking past one another here...

Let's take a few things from the top, just in case... If we think about the perforce setup (before we start doing any git stuff)... You have a perforce workspace/client-spec, right? That is - a setup that tells perforce where you want the files to be placed on your hard drive when you do a standard "p4 sync". Let's call it ~/p4root/ and let us say that your project will then be synced by perforce to ~/p4root/myproj/

When you want to do a git-p4 clone, you should definitely be *outside* of ~/p4root/ . Let's say we have a ~/gitroot/ as well. So do cd ~/gitroot/ so that the git-p4 clone will be under ~/gitroot/myproj/ ; and then do all the git-p4 stuff (clone, add remote, fetch, rebase, sync, submit).

I think Vitors point was that before you do git-p4 submit, you should clean - not ~/gitroot/myproj - but ~/p4root/myproj/.

This is probably not something that you need to do everytime you want to submit back to perforce, but since we have had some rounds with trial-and-error with this, we have probably placed some dirty files inside the perforce folders... Make sure that you don't have files opened in perforce before you sync.

Clearer? More confused? Best of luck anyway :)

    -- Tor Arvid

Hi Tor,

On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 12:53 AM, Tor Arvid Lund <torarvid@gmail.com> wrote:

Yeah, I think we're in sync here. I'm almost sure your (much more detailed) instructions will solve Endre's problem :)

Kind regards,

Hi,

Thanks for your patience and the detailed help. I forgot only one thing, that I need two separate directories... :)

So, after some minor mods in git-p4 (I have some directories with spaces, and some files with #@*% in their names), it seems as if it worked, my files are in P4 depot, although I got an error message:

Failed to merge in the changes. Patch failed at 0001 Initial commit

When you have resolved this problem run "git rebase --continue". If you would prefer to skip this patch, instead run "git rebase --skip". To restore the original branch and stop rebasing run "git rebase --abort".

Exception: command failed: git rebase remotes/p4/master

Regards,

Endre

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Endre Czirbesz <endre@czirbesz.hu> wrote:

Maybe you could run "git p4 submit --verbose"? (the 'verbose' option might give you a clue as to what the underlying problem is)

    -- Tor Arvid

2011/2/7 Tor Arvid Lund <torarvid@gmail.com>:

I did that actually, just did not want to send the whole output. :)

I will investigate it further, but my boss gave a new highest priority task for me... :(

Endre