Fwd: git p4: feature request - branch check filtering

[Dan Porter <dpreid@gmail.com>]

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