Fwd: bzr and perforce

[Josh Matthews]

I recently inquired about the status of bzr-p4 and any other perforce->bzr
integration, and Matt asked me to make the discussion public.  Response to
follow, for context:


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Matt McClure <mlm at aya.yale.edu>
Date: Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 12:47 PM
Subject: Re: bzr and perforce
To: Josh Matthews <josh at joshmatthews.net>


Hi Josh,

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 6:34 PM, Josh Matthews <josh at joshmatthews.net>
wrote:
> Hi Matt,
>
> I'm interested in the current state of Perforce integration with
> distributed source control systems.  I'm collecting information for a
> report I'm writing (I'm a university student on a co-op work term), and
> hoping to show that the current rock-solid, dependable Perforce server
> that my team uses (storing a mere couple hundred thousand files) can be
> reliably integrated with a DVCS like git or bzr to make development
> easier.  I gather from the project page that bzr-p4 is not ready for
> prime time yet, but do you have any thoughts on this matter?  I've
> investigated git-fastimport (it threw some error about bad marshalling
> data after spending 36 hours running at 100%), bzr-fastimport (pretty
> sure it just uses git-fastimport as a base), and tailor (it can import
> from perforce, but can't seem to commit back).  Anything you can add?
> I'm willing to throw coding muscle into any project that has potential,
> but the report itself needs to be written by the end of December.

Thanks for your interest!  You're right that bzr-p4 is not ready for
prime time.  It is, however, starting to take some shape, and I'd
welcome all the help I can get.  I just pushed some changes that make
a p4-fast-export tool available for the first time.  You should be
able to use p4-fast-export, together with bzr fast-import, to produce
a Bazaar branch from a Perforce depot.  I still expect bugs, poor
performance, etc.  I certainly haven't used this in any production
environment yet.

To my knowledge, bzr fast-import doesn't use git fast-import.  Am I wrong?

I'm curious, when you used git fast-import, did you already have
another tool to get a fast-export representation of your Perforce
depot?  Or did you use git-p4 to do it all in one step?

Would you mind if we continue this conversation on the Bazaar mailing list?

Best,
Matt
---------- End Forwarded message ----------

Hi Matt,
bzr fast-import takes the piped output of some frontend (in this case, git
fast-import, unless I'm mistaken).  And I tried both git-p4, and git
fast-import directly, I believe (it was sometime in September, so I don't
remember that well).  Anyways, I'll investigate bzr-p4 some more at work
next week and see what the results are like.

I've also been contemplating some stop-gap measures that would allow for
two-way communication with a perforce server.  Currently, my idea is to use
tailor to import the repo and keep it in sync.  Then I could write a bzr
command (p4submit) that would scan through all commits since the last
p4submit, find any that aren't marked as p4 changelists, and apply the diffs
to the original files in the local perforce workspace.  Then it could p4
submit the changed files with a commit message, and theoretically tailor
would then have no problems updating.

Simply going through these thought excercises makes me appreciate how
wonderfully easy bzr-svn makes life.

Cheers,
Josh
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