[p4] SCCS to Perforce migration ideas

[Rick Macdonald]

I've been searching for SCCS to Perforce migration tools, and mostly all 
I've found is people asking the question. I found one perl script in the 
mail archives that purposely ignores the history (comments).

http://maillist.perforce.com/pipermail/perforce-user/2002-January/007712.html

Is the problem with comments that you'd have to submit a changelist for 
every revision of every file? This could be a lot of changelists and 
would take a long time, but other than that, is this a problem?

The script above does all the revision #1 in one changelist, then all 
the #2, etc. What if we did it by date, taking all the SCCS updates done 
each day, and combining all the comments for each day into the one 
changelist description? I don't know how long they've used SCCS, but 10 
years worth would only be 3600+ changelists. This could alternately be 
split up more by doing a changelist for each user for each day. If 
they've had 100 programmers over the years, this would be up to 360,000 
changelists, but we could perhaps map sets of SCCS users to one in 
Perforce. This whole idea breaks down for files that were updated more 
than once in one day. Borrowing from the script above, we could do a 
changelist for all the 2nd updates each day, all the 3rd, etc.

The script above also doesn't deal with SCCS branches (more than two 
numbers in the revision number: 1.1.1.1). That's a tough one. I'm not 
sure yet if we have branches to deal with or not.

We've been using Perforce for 8 years but have just merged with a 
company that uses SCCS, CVS and Subversion for the three different areas 
of their system. Potentially, all three would be migrated.

...RickM...