git-p4

Kent Borg
2010-09-10T20:24:17Z

I have a git-p4 question: I work in a Perforce shop and am doing Linux
kernel work, I need to share that work with colleagues who see the world
as a Perforce place. The kernel I have came from Linus' tree and has a
lot of history. When I try to do my first a "git p4 submit" it chokes
as it looks back in the entire git history until it fails looking for
the ancestor of the first commit (linux-2.6.12-rc2!), I think it is
looking for the last time it did a git-p4 submit so it knows how far
back to go--but it has never done a submit in this new relationship
between p4 and git. There is plenty of git history that is not
reflected in p4, and I don't want it in p4, I just want new work in p4.

I fear that git-p4 is for git people to contribute to bits natively
p4-homed code, not this case where the code is natively git-homed code
and it is the p4 people who will be contributing bits.

My attempt at a work around was this:

- create a director on the p4 side, and from the p4 side submit the
files that match my latest git submit.

- sync with git-p4

- try to submit a file with git-p4...and that fails as it runs all the
way back through the history. (Thank goodness it didn't succeed in
submitting kernel activity since 2005!)

I was hoping I could merge the p4/master with master to force a stopping
point in the git-p4 submit, but that doesn't work, it is searching
through git history to find the stopping point. What might I put in the
git history to force the stop (or maybe make a change to git-p4 to help
my plight along)?

Thanks,

-kb, the Kent who has always hated Perforce, alas.