[p4] moving projects from one depot to another

[Tyler Hopaluk]

I inherited at situation that I don't know how to handle.

 

Do to poor perforce management we have several depots that all contain different projects. What we have been directed to do is consolidate all the various projects in different depots to one depot for each project type. For example:

 

 

Current organization:

 

Existing Depot 1: proj_type_A_1

                          proj_type_B_1

 

Existing Depot 2: proj_type_B_2

                          proj_type_C_1

 

Existing Depot 3: proj_type_A_2

                          proj_type_C_2

 

 

Required organization:

 

New Depot for A types: proj_type_A_1

                                   proj_type_A_2

 

New Depot for B types: proj_type_B_1

                                   proj_type_B_2

 

New Depot for C types: proj_type_C_1

                                   proj_type_C_2

 

 

The problem is that the depots will have different names then the existing and the old depots will need to be deleted/removed/hidden from depot listing of the users. Doing an integrate will effectively move the current revision of the files to the new depots but the history will still point to the old paths on old depots and once the old depots are gone, so is that file history.

 

The only possible solutions that come to mind is either find some way to hide the old empty depots from the users but still allow them to access the file history they contain, generate some elaborate script that will start at the head of each file and do a get revision,copy the file to the new location, check in, get next revision, copy, check in, etc. Or lastly, loose the file history and start from scratch.

 

So far I don't believe perforce permissions allow hiding of the listing of the old depots and still allow users to access the old file revisions from them. The scripting method is also very undesirable do to the large amounts of files and many revisions, plus the script way will cause the date/time information to be lost as well as the original user who checked in the file. And loosing the history defeats the point of using perforce in the first place.

 

It would be great if there was some admin tool that could pull a file and all its revisions out of a depot and move it to another depot.

 

Any ideas on how to handle this problem?

 

Tyler