Re: Suggested improvements to the git-p4 documentation (branch-related)

[Olivier Delalleau <shish@keba.be>]

2013/1/5 Pete Wyckoff <pw@padd.com>:
> shish@keba.be wrote on Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:58 -0500:
>> While struggling to get git-p4 to work properly with branches, I
>> thought the documentation on http://git-scm.com/docs/git-p4 could use
>> some improvements:
>
> Thanks, I definitely appreciate the constructive comments here.
>
>> 1. At the end of the "Branch detection" section, the following
>> commands are provided (for when you want to explicitly provide branch
>> mappings to git-p4):
>>
>> git config git-p4.branchList main:branch1
>> git p4 clone --detect-branches //depot@all
>>
>> The second command should end with a dot (".") because the first
>> command only works if you are already in a git-initialized folder.
>> Thus I would also suggest to add "git init" as first command to type.
>
> That is confusing.  I'll make it this:
>
>     git init depot
>     cd depot
>     git config git-p4.branchList main:branch1
>     git p4 clone --detect-branches //depot@all .

Sounds good, thanks.

>
>> 2. Even though having a "main" branch is standard in Perforce, it
>> would be worth mentioning what happens when you don't: there is a
>> message "Could not detect main branch. No checkout/master branch
>> created" output by the "git p4 clone" command. However, it will still
>> work if you manually set the master branch ("git checkout -b master
>> remotes/p4/my_custom_main_branch").
>
> This feels like a bug to me, and indeed I had an old patch series
> that planned to fix it.  Let me knock that into shape, instead of
> changing the documentation.  It will automatically do the
> checkout step you did.

Sounds good as well.

>
>> 3. I don't know what I missed for that one, but I haven't been able to
>> get the example for the --branch option to work. It says that after
>> "git init", we can import a p4 branch with:
>>
>> git p4 sync --branch=refs/remotes/p4/proj2 //depot/proj2
>>
>> However, after doing this, followed by "git checkout -b proj2
>> remotes/p4/proj2", I am unable to properly use "git p4 sync" or "git
>> p4 submit" from this branch, as git complains about a missing
>> refs/remotes/p4/master.
>
> Yes, also annoying.  I have a failing test case for this, but
> haven't fixed it yet.  The idea is that "git p4 sync --branch=proj2"
> will sync refs/remotes/p4/proj2.  If there is no p4/master, and
> you don't specify --branch, it will fail with a more useful error
> message.

Good too!

> For submit, there is code that walks from your current branch
> back in history until it finds a commit on a known p4 remote
> branch.  This is sort of like the merge-base calculation in git,
> but restricted to a linear history.  I haven't tested that
> recently, but will add a test and fix it if needed too.
>
>
> Please do feel welcome to to rearrange or expand the
> documentation so it makes more sense, if you are so inspired.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with git documentation to dig into
it myself, but anyway that's about what I had for now. I'll send more
comments to the mailing list if I have more suggestions in the future.

Thanks for a great tool! :)

-=- Olivier