bzr-p4 progress

[Matt McClure]

On Sep 25, 2009, at 8:31 PM, Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> wrote:

> Hi Matt,
>
> Is it possible to fetch the contents of
> an arbitrary revision or inspect the revision graph *without*  
> converting
> the whole repository to a bzr format first?

The Perforce client library can fetch an arbitrary revision and answer  
questions like "what is the revision before/after revision n?"

>> On the Perforce side, I can wrap p4 commands to get information about
>> arbitrary revisions.  The revision "graph" is always linear, for a
>> first approximation.  As far as I'm aware, there is no widely  
>> accepted
>> convention for repository layouts of branches in Perforce, whereas
>> there is such a convention in Subversion.  So tracking more than one
>> Perforce branch isn't one of my highest priorities.
>>
>> Once the revisions have been migrated via
>> p4-fast-export/bzr-fast-import, they live in a Bazaar branch that can
>> be inspected like any other.  By saving marks files, the mapping
>> between Perforce changelist numbers and Bazaar revision IDs is
>> preserved.
> So that implies that all operations that would access a p4 repository
> would have to convert it to a Bazaar repository first?

I think not. Instead bzr-p4 can call the Perforce client library which  
will access the depot over the network. Is that sufficient?

Of course, I have some code to write. The bzr-p4 plugin doesn't do all  
this yet, but so far I don't why it couldn't.

Matt