Using Git as a frontend to Perforce

After using Git for both my work and leaisure programming for more than three years, it was hard to go back to p4. hence, I wanted to set up git so that I could use it as an interface to p4 in the same way that git-svn had serverd me so well for the last year, saving me from the sad valley of Subversion.

Since git-p4 was removed from Debian a good while back, I had to manually install it on my Debian stable system:

# wget http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git/plain/git-p4.py?id=master -O /usr/local/bin/git-p4
# chmod +x /usr/local/bin/git-p4

After adding /usr/local/bin to my PATH variable, git p4 worked like any other git plugin.

$ git p4

I also downloaded the man pages for git p4 and included it in the MANPATH:

# wget http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git-manpages.git/plain/man1/git-p4.1?id=master \
       -O /usr/local/man/man1/git-p4.1
$ grep MANPATH ~/.bashrc
export MANPATH=/usr/local/man/man1:$MANPATH

With this in place, man git-p4 works as it should.

Cloning a depot project with full history

$ git p4 clone //depot/escenic/engine/trunk@all

Updating the Git project with the latest changes from p4

This puts your changes ontop of the latest, pulled down changes:

$ git p4 rebase

This just includes the latest changes from p4

$ git p4 sync

So far, I've just used git p4 rebase for everything.

When it's not possible to git p4 submit

$ cd ~/src/git/moria
$ files=$(git show 15857cab8a21f48cffa2b92a650f6d37723efec6 | \
  sed -n 's#diff --git a/\(.*\) b/.*#\1#p')

The files variable now holds the files belonging to my Git commit.

$ echo "$files"
moria-core/pom.xml
moria-core/src/main/java/org/moria/core/servlet/ArticleRedirectProcessor.java
moria-core/src/main/java/org/moria/core/servlet/RedirectProcessor.java
moria-core/src/main/java/org/moria/core/servlet/SectionResolverProcessor.java
moria-core/src/test/java/org/moria/presentation/servlet/SectionResolverProcessorTestCase.java

Now, I shift to my p4 workspace and checkout these files`:

$ cd ~/src/p4/moria
$ for el in $files; do p4 edit $el; done

Then, copy the contents from my git directory:

$ for el in $files; do cp ~/src/git/moria/$el $el; done

The p4 diff should now be the same as my previous git log --patch:

$ cd ~/src/p4/moria
$ p4 diff ...