Moving to perforce

[KohtalaMarkoMarko.Kohtala at ntc.nokia.com]

Greetings all. I am a new Perforce user and have some problems.

I have a few branches of a program. One branch of the program is
maintained elsewhere and I receive patches to update the tree. The
other branches have their own source trees on my disk. For history, I
just keep some old diffs to the main source tree for my branches.

Now, since this seems so similar to the Perforce idea of SCM, I
thought I could try it out. I am hoping to get some help from Perforce
in merging the changes made in different branches.

Moving the original source tree to Perforce was no problem. Just set
up the client and move to the directory that contains the root of the
original source tree and do

       find . -type f -print | p4 -x - add
       p4 submit

Great!

However, now I get a patch file and need to apply it to the source
tree. How do I do that? The patch creates files, removed files and
changes files. I do not want to do the p4 add, p4 delete, and p4 edit
by hand.

Are there any tools to help with the use of patch?

I thought about writing a script to analyze the patch file on its way
to the patch program, but it is very difficult to make reliable. The
difficulty comes from the -d and -p options to patch, and the escaping
done by diff to the filenames.

Another problem is with moving my branches to Perforce. I do not want
to add all the files to Perforce and then integrate any common
files. This seems to copies of all files to the depot even if they are
not different in my branch. It seems like great labor to go through
the files and see which files are new and which must be removed.

I was hoping the advertizing for off-line development meant some
support for detecting later what has happened in a source tree and
performing the add, delete, and edit later. This would help here too.

Any tools to do this?

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Marko Kohtala - Marko.Kohtala at ntc.nokia.com, Marko.Kohtala at hut.fi