Mercurial for offline work on Perforce projects?

[Steve Borho]

On Tuesday 08 May 2007, Kunle Odutola wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a number of projects hosted in Perforce depots that I'd like to work
> on from my laptop while disconnected from the Perforce servers hosting the
> depots. My understanding from my basic research is that a distributed SCM
> like Mercurial might be an ideal tool for my needs as it can be used to
> effectively add offline editing capability to a centralized SCM like
> Perforce.
>
> Given that the source Perforce depots must remain the master depots (and
> I'd like to preserve all history including all my individual offline
> commits), I though I'd ask if anyone here felt Mercurial was suitable for
> working on Perforce-hosted projects in a such a manner. I imagine the
> workflow would be something like:
>
> - Pull project + history from Perforce into 'from_p4' repo
> - Branch/Clone 'from_p4' repo to create 'from_p4_working' repo
>   ...
> *edit-and-commit-in-'from_p4_working'-repo-as-often-as-needed*

Eric Hopper has a tool which somewhat automates the above processes.

http://hg.omnifarious.org/~hopper/p4_to_hg

> - Merge intervening changes from Perforce into 'from_p4_working' via
> 'from_p4' (perhaps with option to choose wanted changes)
> - Push offline changes in 'from_p4_working' repo incrementally to the
> Perforce source (perhaps with option to choose changes to push)

But these last steps are currently a manual process.

-- 
Steve Borho (steve at borho.org)
http://www.borho.org/~steve/steve.asc
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