git svn

The base command in Git for all the Subversion bridging commands is git svn. It takes quite a few commands, so we’ll show the most common while going through a few simple workflows.

It’s important to note that when you’re using git svn, you’re interacting with Subversion, which is a system that works very differently from Git. Although you can do local branching and merging, it’s generally best to keep your history as linear as possible by rebasing your work, and avoiding doing things like simultaneously interacting with a Git remote repository.

Don’t rewrite your history and try to push again, and don’t push to a parallel Git repository to collaborate with fellow Git developers at the same time. Subversion can have only a single linear history, and confusing it is very easy. If you’re working with a team, and some are using SVN and others are using Git, make sure everyone is using the SVN server to collaborate – doing so will make your life easier.

Setting Up

To demonstrate this functionality, you need a typical SVN repository that you have write access to. If you want to copy these examples, you’ll have to make a writeable copy of my test repository. In order to do that easily, you can use a tool called svnsync that comes with Subversion. For these tests, we created a new Subversion repository on Google Code that was a partial copy of the protobuf project, which is a tool that encodes structured data for network transmission.

To follow along, you first need to create a new local Subversion repository:

$ mkdir /tmp/test-svn
$ svnadmin create /tmp/test-svn

Then, enable all users to change revprops – the easy way is to add a pre-revprop-change script that always exits 0:

$ cat /tmp/test-svn/hooks/pre-revprop-change
#!/bin/sh
exit 0;
$ chmod +x /tmp/test-svn/hooks/pre-revprop-change

You can now sync this project to your local machine by calling svnsync init with the to and from repositories.

$ svnsync init file:///tmp/test-svn \
  http://progit-example.googlecode.com/svn/

This sets up the properties to run the sync. You can then clone the code by running

$ svnsync sync file:///tmp/test-svn
Committed revision 1.
Copied properties for revision 1.
Transmitting file data .............................[...]
Committed revision 2.
Copied properties for revision 2.
[…]

Although this operation may take only a few minutes, if you try to copy the original repository to another remote repository instead of a local one, the process will take nearly an hour, even though there are fewer than 100 commits. Subversion has to clone one revision at a time and then push it back into another repository – it’s ridiculously inefficient, but it’s the only easy way to do this.

Getting Started

Now that you have a Subversion repository to which you have write access, you can go through a typical workflow. You’ll start with the git svn clone command, which imports an entire Subversion repository into a local Git repository. Remember that if you’re importing from a real hosted Subversion repository, you should replace the file:///tmp/test-svn here with the URL of your Subversion repository:

$ git svn clone file:///tmp/test-svn -T trunk -b branches -t tags
Initialized empty Git repository in /private/tmp/progit/test-svn/.git/
r1 = dcbfb5891860124cc2e8cc616cded42624897125 (refs/remotes/origin/trunk)
    A	m4/acx_pthread.m4
    A	m4/stl_hash.m4
    A	java/src/test/java/com/google/protobuf/UnknownFieldSetTest.java
    A	java/src/test/java/com/google/protobuf/WireFormatTest.java
…
r75 = 556a3e1e7ad1fde0a32823fc7e4d046bcfd86dae (refs/remotes/origin/trunk)
Found possible branch point: file:///tmp/test-svn/trunk => file:///tmp/test-svn/branches/my-calc-branch, 75
Found branch parent: (refs/remotes/origin/my-calc-branch) 556a3e1e7ad1fde0a32823fc7e4d046bcfd86dae
Following parent with do_switch
Successfully followed parent
r76 = 0fb585761df569eaecd8146c71e58d70147460a2 (refs/remotes/origin/my-calc-branch)
Checked out HEAD:
  file:///tmp/test-svn/trunk r75

This runs the equivalent of two commands – git svn init followed by git svn fetch – on the URL you provide. This can take a while. The test project has only about 75 commits and the codebase isn’t that big, but Git has to check out each version, one at a time, and commit it individually. For a project with hundreds or thousands of commits, this can literally take hours or even days to finish.

The -T trunk -b branches -t tags part tells Git that this Subversion repository follows the basic branching and tagging conventions. If you name your trunk, branches, or tags differently, you can change these options. Because this is so common, you can replace this entire part with -s, which means standard layout and implies all those options. The following command is equivalent:

$ git svn clone file:///tmp/test-svn -s

At this point, you should have a valid Git repository that has imported your branches and tags:

$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/my-calc-branch
  remotes/origin/tags/2.0.2
  remotes/origin/tags/release-2.0.1
  remotes/origin/tags/release-2.0.2
  remotes/origin/tags/release-2.0.2rc1
  remotes/origin/trunk

Note how this tool manages Subversion tags as remote refs. Let’s take a closer look with the Git plumbing command show-ref:

$ git show-ref
556a3e1e7ad1fde0a32823fc7e4d046bcfd86dae refs/heads/master
0fb585761df569eaecd8146c71e58d70147460a2 refs/remotes/origin/my-calc-branch
bfd2d79303166789fc73af4046651a4b35c12f0b refs/remotes/origin/tags/2.0.2
285c2b2e36e467dd4d91c8e3c0c0e1750b3fe8ca refs/remotes/origin/tags/release-2.0.1
cbda99cb45d9abcb9793db1d4f70ae562a969f1e refs/remotes/origin/tags/release-2.0.2
a9f074aa89e826d6f9d30808ce5ae3ffe711feda refs/remotes/origin/tags/release-2.0.2rc1
556a3e1e7ad1fde0a32823fc7e4d046bcfd86dae refs/remotes/origin/trunk

Git doesn’t do this when it clones from a Git server; here’s what a repository with tags looks like after a fresh clone:

$ git show-ref
c3dcbe8488c6240392e8a5d7553bbffcb0f94ef0 refs/remotes/origin/master
32ef1d1c7cc8c603ab78416262cc421b80a8c2df refs/remotes/origin/branch-1
75f703a3580a9b81ead89fe1138e6da858c5ba18 refs/remotes/origin/branch-2
23f8588dde934e8f33c263c6d8359b2ae095f863 refs/tags/v0.1.0
7064938bd5e7ef47bfd79a685a62c1e2649e2ce7 refs/tags/v0.2.0
6dcb09b5b57875f334f61aebed695e2e4193db5e refs/tags/v1.0.0

Git fetches the tags directly into refs/tags, rather than treating them remote branches.

Committing Back to Subversion

Now that you have a working repository, you can do some work on the project and push your commits back upstream, using Git effectively as a SVN client. If you edit one of the files and commit it, you have a commit that exists in Git locally that doesn’t exist on the Subversion server:

$ git commit -am 'Adding git-svn instructions to the README'
[master 4af61fd] Adding git-svn instructions to the README
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+)

Next, you need to push your change upstream. Notice how this changes the way you work with Subversion – you can do several commits offline and then push them all at once to the Subversion server. To push to a Subversion server, you run the git svn dcommit command:

$ git svn dcommit
Committing to file:///tmp/test-svn/trunk ...
    M	README.txt
Committed r77
    M	README.txt
r77 = 95e0222ba6399739834380eb10afcd73e0670bc5 (refs/remotes/origin/trunk)
No changes between 4af61fd05045e07598c553167e0f31c84fd6ffe1 and refs/remotes/origin/trunk
Resetting to the latest refs/remotes/origin/trunk

This takes all the commits you’ve made on top of the Subversion server code, does a Subversion commit for each, and then rewrites your local Git commit to include a unique identifier. This is important because it means that all the SHA-1 checksums for your commits change. Partly for this reason, working with Git-based remote versions of your projects concurrently with a Subversion server isn’t a good idea. If you look at the last commit, you can see the new git-svn-id that was added:

$ git log -1
commit 95e0222ba6399739834380eb10afcd73e0670bc5
Author: ben <ben@0b684db3-b064-4277-89d1-21af03df0a68>
Date:   Thu Jul 24 03:08:36 2014 +0000

    Adding git-svn instructions to the README

    git-svn-id: file:///tmp/test-svn/trunk@77 0b684db3-b064-4277-89d1-21af03df0a68

Notice that the SHA-1 checksum that originally started with 4af61fd when you committed now begins with 95e0222. If you want to push to both a Git server and a Subversion server, you have to push (dcommit) to the Subversion server first, because that action changes your commit data.

Pulling in New Changes

If you’re working with other developers, then at some point one of you will push, and then the other one will try to push a change that conflicts. That change will be rejected until you merge in their work. In git svn, it looks like this:

$ git svn dcommit
Committing to file:///tmp/test-svn/trunk ...

ERROR from SVN:
Transaction is out of date: File '/trunk/README.txt' is out of date
W: d5837c4b461b7c0e018b49d12398769d2bfc240a and refs/remotes/origin/trunk differ, using rebase:
:100644 100644 f414c433af0fd6734428cf9d2a9fd8ba00ada145 c80b6127dd04f5fcda218730ddf3a2da4eb39138 M	README.txt
Current branch master is up to date.
ERROR: Not all changes have been committed into SVN, however the committed
ones (if any) seem to be successfully integrated into the working tree.
Please see the above messages for details.

To resolve this situation, you can run git svn rebase, which pulls down any changes on the server that you don’t have yet and rebases any work you have on top of what is on the server:

$ git svn rebase
Committing to file:///tmp/test-svn/trunk ...

ERROR from SVN:
Transaction is out of date: File '/trunk/README.txt' is out of date
W: eaa029d99f87c5c822c5c29039d19111ff32ef46 and refs/remotes/origin/trunk differ, using rebase:
:100644 100644 65536c6e30d263495c17d781962cfff12422693a b34372b25ccf4945fe5658fa381b075045e7702a M	README.txt
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Applying: update foo
Using index info to reconstruct a base tree...
M	README.txt
Falling back to patching base and 3-way merge...
Auto-merging README.txt
ERROR: Not all changes have been committed into SVN, however the committed
ones (if any) seem to be successfully integrated into the working tree.
Please see the above messages for details.

Now, all your work is on top of what is on the Subversion server, so you can successfully dcommit:

$ git svn dcommit
Committing to file:///tmp/test-svn/trunk ...
    M	README.txt
Committed r85
    M	README.txt
r85 = 9c29704cc0bbbed7bd58160cfb66cb9191835cd8 (refs/remotes/origin/trunk)
No changes between 5762f56732a958d6cfda681b661d2a239cc53ef5 and refs/remotes/origin/trunk
Resetting to the latest refs/remotes/origin/trunk

Note that unlike Git, which requires you to merge upstream work you don’t yet have locally before you can push, git svn makes you do that only if the changes conflict (much like how Subversion works). If someone else pushes a change to one file and then you push a change to another file, your dcommit will work fine:

$ git svn dcommit
Committing to file:///tmp/test-svn/trunk ...
    M	configure.ac
Committed r87
    M	autogen.sh
r86 = d8450bab8a77228a644b7dc0e95977ffc61adff7 (refs/remotes/origin/trunk)
    M	configure.ac
r87 = f3653ea40cb4e26b6281cec102e35dcba1fe17c4 (refs/remotes/origin/trunk)
W: a0253d06732169107aa020390d9fefd2b1d92806 and refs/remotes/origin/trunk differ, using rebase:
:100755 100755 efa5a59965fbbb5b2b0a12890f1b351bb5493c18 e757b59a9439312d80d5d43bb65d4a7d0389ed6d M	autogen.sh
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...

This is important to remember, because the outcome is a project state that didn’t exist on either of your computers when you pushed. If the changes are incompatible but don’t conflict, you may get issues that are difficult to diagnose. This is different than using a Git server – in Git, you can fully test the state on your client system before publishing it, whereas in SVN, you can’t ever be certain that the states immediately before commit and after commit are identical.

You should also run this command to pull in changes from the Subversion server, even if you’re not ready to commit yourself. You can run git svn fetch to grab the new data, but git svn rebase does the fetch and then updates your local commits.

$ git svn rebase
    M	autogen.sh
r88 = c9c5f83c64bd755368784b444bc7a0216cc1e17b (refs/remotes/origin/trunk)
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Fast-forwarded master to refs/remotes/origin/trunk.

Running git svn rebase every once in a while makes sure your code is always up to date. You need to be sure your working directory is clean when you run this, though. If you have local changes, you must either stash your work or temporarily commit it before running git svn rebase – otherwise, the command will stop if it sees that the rebase will result in a merge conflict.

Git Branching Issues

When you’ve become comfortable with a Git workflow, you’ll likely create topic branches, do work on them, and then merge them in. If you’re pushing to a Subversion server via git svn, you may want to rebase your work onto a single branch each time instead of merging branches together. The reason to prefer rebasing is that Subversion has a linear history and doesn’t deal with merges like Git does, so git svn follows only the first parent when converting the snapshots into Subversion commits.

Suppose your history looks like the following: you created an experiment branch, did two commits, and then merged them back into master. When you dcommit, you see output like this:

$ git svn dcommit
Committing to file:///tmp/test-svn/trunk ...
    M	CHANGES.txt
Committed r89
    M	CHANGES.txt
r89 = 89d492c884ea7c834353563d5d913c6adf933981 (refs/remotes/origin/trunk)
    M	COPYING.txt
    M	INSTALL.txt
Committed r90
    M	INSTALL.txt
    M	COPYING.txt
r90 = cb522197870e61467473391799148f6721bcf9a0 (refs/remotes/origin/trunk)
No changes between 71af502c214ba13123992338569f4669877f55fd and refs/remotes/origin/trunk
Resetting to the latest refs/remotes/origin/trunk

Running dcommit on a branch with merged history works fine, except that when you look at your Git project history, it hasn’t rewritten either of the commits you made on the experiment branch – instead, all those changes appear in the SVN version of the single merge commit.

When someone else clones that work, all they see is the merge commit with all the work squashed into it, as though you ran git merge --squash; they don’t see the commit data about where it came from or when it was committed.

Subversion Branching

Branching in Subversion isn’t the same as branching in Git; if you can avoid using it much, that’s probably best. However, you can create and commit to branches in Subversion using git svn.

Creating a New SVN Branch

To create a new branch in Subversion, you run git svn branch [branchname]:

$ git svn branch opera
Copying file:///tmp/test-svn/trunk at r90 to file:///tmp/test-svn/branches/opera...
Found possible branch point: file:///tmp/test-svn/trunk => file:///tmp/test-svn/branches/opera, 90
Found branch parent: (refs/remotes/origin/opera) cb522197870e61467473391799148f6721bcf9a0
Following parent with do_switch
Successfully followed parent
r91 = f1b64a3855d3c8dd84ee0ef10fa89d27f1584302 (refs/remotes/origin/opera)

This does the equivalent of the svn copy trunk branches/opera command in Subversion and operates on the Subversion server. It’s important to note that it doesn’t check you out into that branch; if you commit at this point, that commit will go to trunk on the server, not opera.

Switching Active Branches

Git figures out what branch your dcommits go to by looking for the tip of any of your Subversion branches in your history – you should have only one, and it should be the last one with a git-svn-id in your current branch history.

If you want to work on more than one branch simultaneously, you can set up local branches to dcommit to specific Subversion branches by starting them at the imported Subversion commit for that branch. If you want an opera branch that you can work on separately, you can run

$ git branch opera remotes/origin/opera

Now, if you want to merge your opera branch into trunk (your master branch), you can do so with a normal git merge. But you need to provide a descriptive commit message (via -m), or the merge will say “Merge branch opera” instead of something useful.

Remember that although you’re using git merge to do this operation, and the merge likely will be much easier than it would be in Subversion (because Git will automatically detect the appropriate merge base for you), this isn’t a normal Git merge commit. You have to push this data back to a Subversion server that can’t handle a commit that tracks more than one parent; so, after you push it up, it will look like a single commit that squashed in all the work of another branch under a single commit. After you merge one branch into another, you can’t easily go back and continue working on that branch, as you normally can in Git. The dcommit command that you run erases any information that says what branch was merged in, so subsequent merge-base calculations will be wrong – the dcommit makes your git merge result look like you ran git merge --squash. Unfortunately, there’s no good way to avoid this situation – Subversion can’t store this information, so you’ll always be crippled by its limitations while you’re using it as your server. To avoid issues, you should delete the local branch (in this case, opera) after you merge it into trunk.

Subversion Commands

The git svn toolset provides a number of commands to help ease the transition to Git by providing some functionality that’s similar to what you had in Subversion. Here are a few commands that give you what Subversion used to.

$ git svn log
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r87 | schacon | 2014-05-02 16:07:37 -0700 (Sat, 02 May 2014) | 2 lines

autogen change

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r86 | schacon | 2014-05-02 16:00:21 -0700 (Sat, 02 May 2014) | 2 lines

Merge branch 'experiment'

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r85 | schacon | 2014-05-02 16:00:09 -0700 (Sat, 02 May 2014) | 2 lines

updated the changelog

$ git svn blame README.txt
 2   temporal Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format
 2   temporal Copyright 2008 Google Inc.
 2   temporal http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/
 2   temporal
22   temporal C++ Installation - Unix
22   temporal =======================
 2   temporal
79    schacon Committing in git-svn.
78    schacon
 2   temporal To build and install the C++ Protocol Buffer runtime and the Protocol
 2   temporal Buffer compiler (protoc) execute the following:
 2   temporal

$ git svn info
Path: .
URL: https://schacon-test.googlecode.com/svn/trunk
Repository Root: https://schacon-test.googlecode.com/svn
Repository UUID: 4c93b258-373f-11de-be05-5f7a86268029
Revision: 87
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: schacon
Last Changed Rev: 87
Last Changed Date: 2009-05-02 16:07:37 -0700 (Sat, 02 May 2009)

$ git svn show-ignore > .git/info/exclude

Git-Svn Summary

The git svn tools are useful if you’re stuck with a Subversion server, or are otherwise in a development environment that necessitates running a Subversion server. You should consider it crippled Git, however, or you’ll hit issues in translation that may confuse you and your collaborators. To stay out of trouble, try to follow these guidelines:

• Keep a linear Git history that doesn’t contain merge commits made by git merge. Rebase any work you do outside of your mainline branch back onto it; don’t merge it in.

• Don’t set up and collaborate on a separate Git server. Possibly have one to speed up clones for new developers, but don’t push anything to it that doesn’t have a git-svn-id entry. You may even want to add a pre-receive hook that checks each commit message for a git-svn-id and rejects pushes that contain commits without it.

If you follow those guidelines, working with a Subversion server can be more bearable. However, if it’s possible to move to a real Git server, doing so can gain your team a lot more.

git-remote-hg

First, you need to install git-remote-hg. This basically entails dropping its file somewhere in your path, like so:

$ curl -o ~/bin/git-remote-hg \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/felipec/git-remote-hg/master/git-remote-hg
$ chmod +x ~/bin/git-remote-hg

…assuming ~/bin is in your $PATH. Git-remote-hg has one other dependency: the mercurial library for Python. If you have Python installed, this is as simple as:

$ pip install mercurial

(If you don’t have Python installed, visit https://www.python.org/ and get it first.)

The last thing you’ll need is the Mercurial client. Go to http://mercurial.selenic.com/ and install it if you haven’t already.

Now you’re ready to rock. All you need is a Mercurial repository you can push to. Fortunately, every Mercurial repository can act this way, so we’ll just use the "hello world" repository everyone uses to learn Mercurial:

$ hg clone http://selenic.com/repo/hello /tmp/hello

Getting Started

Now that we have a suitable “server-side” repository, we can go through a typical workflow. As you’ll see, these two systems are similar enough that there isn’t much friction.

As always with Git, first we clone:

$ git clone hg::/tmp/hello /tmp/hello-git
$ cd /tmp/hello-git
$ git log --oneline --graph --decorate
* ac7955c (HEAD, origin/master, origin/branches/default, origin/HEAD, refs/hg/origin/branches/default, refs/hg/origin/bookmarks/master, master) Create a makefile
* 65bb417 Create a standard "hello, world" program

You’ll notice that working with a Mercurial repository uses the standard git clone command. That’s because git-remote-hg is working at a fairly low level, using a similar mechanism to how Git’s HTTP/S protocol is implemented (remote helpers). Since Git and Mercurial are both designed for every client to have a full copy of the repository history, this command makes a full clone, including all the project’s history, and does it fairly quickly.

The log command shows two commits, the latest of which is pointed to by a whole slew of refs. It turns out some of these aren’t actually there. Let’s take a look at what’s actually in the .git directory:

$ tree .git/refs
.git/refs
├── heads
│   └── master
├── hg
│   └── origin
│       ├── bookmarks
│       │   └── master
│       └── branches
│           └── default
├── notes
│   └── hg
├── remotes
│   └── origin
│       └── HEAD
└── tags

9 directories, 5 files

Git-remote-hg is trying to make things more idiomatically Git-esque, but under the hood it’s managing the conceptual mapping between two slightly different systems. The refs/hg directory is where the actual remote refs are stored. For example, the refs/hg/origin/branches/default is a Git ref file that contains the SHA-1 starting with “ac7955c”, which is the commit that master points to. So the refs/hg directory is kind of like a fake refs/remotes/origin, but it has the added distinction between bookmarks and branches.

The notes/hg file is the starting point for how git-remote-hg maps Git commit hashes to Mercurial changeset IDs. Let’s explore a bit:

$ cat notes/hg
d4c10386...

$ git cat-file -p d4c10386...
tree 1781c96...
author remote-hg <> 1408066400 -0800
committer remote-hg <> 1408066400 -0800

Notes for master

$ git ls-tree 1781c96...
100644 blob ac9117f...	65bb417...
100644 blob 485e178...	ac7955c...

$ git cat-file -p ac9117f
0a04b987be5ae354b710cefeba0e2d9de7ad41a9

So refs/notes/hg points to a tree, which in the Git object database is a list of other objects with names. git ls-tree outputs the mode, type, object hash, and filename for items inside a tree. Once we dig down to one of the tree items, we find that inside it is a blob named “ac9117f” (the SHA-1 hash of the commit pointed to by master), with contents “0a04b98” (which is the ID of the Mercurial changeset at the tip of the default branch).

The good news is that we mostly don’t have to worry about all of this. The typical workflow won’t be very different from working with a Git remote.

There’s one more thing we should attend to before we continue: ignores. Mercurial and Git use a very similar mechanism for this, but it’s likely you don’t want to actually commit a .gitignore file into a Mercurial repository. Fortunately, Git has a way to ignore files that’s local to an on-disk repository, and the Mercurial format is compatible with Git, so you just have to copy it over:

$ cp .hgignore .git/info/exclude

The .git/info/exclude file acts just like a .gitignore, but isn’t included in commits.

Workflow

Let’s assume we’ve done some work and made some commits on the master branch, and you’re ready to push it to the remote repository. Here’s what our repository looks like right now:

$ git log --oneline --graph --decorate
* ba04a2a (HEAD, master) Update makefile
* d25d16f Goodbye
* ac7955c (origin/master, origin/branches/default, origin/HEAD, refs/hg/origin/branches/default, refs/hg/origin/bookmarks/master) Create a makefile
* 65bb417 Create a standard "hello, world" program

Our master branch is two commits ahead of origin/master, but those two commits exist only on our local machine. Let’s see if anyone else has been doing important work at the same time:

$ git fetch
From hg::/tmp/hello
   ac7955c..df85e87  master     -> origin/master
   ac7955c..df85e87  branches/default -> origin/branches/default
$ git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all
* 7b07969 (refs/notes/hg) Notes for default
* d4c1038 Notes for master
* df85e87 (origin/master, origin/branches/default, origin/HEAD, refs/hg/origin/branches/default, refs/hg/origin/bookmarks/master) Add some documentation
| * ba04a2a (HEAD, master) Update makefile
| * d25d16f Goodbye
|/
* ac7955c Create a makefile
* 65bb417 Create a standard "hello, world" program

Since we used the --all flag, we see the “notes” refs that are used internally by git-remote-hg, but we can ignore them. The rest is what we expected; origin/master has advanced by one commit, and our history has now diverged. Unlike the other systems we work with in this chapter, Mercurial is capable of handling merges, so we’re not going to do anything fancy.

$ git merge origin/master
Auto-merging hello.c
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
 hello.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
$ git log --oneline --graph --decorate
*   0c64627 (HEAD, master) Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
|\
| * df85e87 (origin/master, origin/branches/default, origin/HEAD, refs/hg/origin/branches/default, refs/hg/origin/bookmarks/master) Add some documentation
* | ba04a2a Update makefile
* | d25d16f Goodbye
|/
* ac7955c Create a makefile
* 65bb417 Create a standard "hello, world" program

Perfect. We run the tests and everything passes, so we’re ready to share our work with the rest of the team:

$ git push
To hg::/tmp/hello
   df85e87..0c64627  master -> master

That’s it! If you take a look at the Mercurial repository, you’ll see that this did what we’d expect:

$ hg log -G --style compact
o    5[tip]:4,2   dc8fa4f932b8   2014-08-14 19:33 -0700   ben
|\     Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
| |
| o  4   64f27bcefc35   2014-08-14 19:27 -0700   ben
| |    Update makefile
| |
| o  3:1   4256fc29598f   2014-08-14 19:27 -0700   ben
| |    Goodbye
| |
@ |  2   7db0b4848b3c   2014-08-14 19:30 -0700   ben
|/     Add some documentation
|
o  1   82e55d328c8c   2005-08-26 01:21 -0700   mpm
|    Create a makefile
|
o  0   0a04b987be5a   2005-08-26 01:20 -0700   mpm
     Create a standard "hello, world" program

The changeset numbered 2 was made by Mercurial, and the changesets numbered 3 and 4 were made by git-remote-hg, by pushing commits made with Git.

Branches and Bookmarks

Git has only one kind of branch: a reference that moves when commits are made. In Mercurial, this kind of a reference is called a “bookmark,” and it behaves in much the same way as a Git branch.

Mercurial’s concept of a “branch” is more heavyweight. The branch that a changeset is made on is recorded with the changeset, which means it will always be in the repository history. Here’s an example of a commit that was made on the develop branch:

$ hg log -l 1
changeset:   6:8f65e5e02793
branch:      develop
tag:         tip
user:        Ben Straub <ben@straub.cc>
date:        Thu Aug 14 20:06:38 2014 -0700
summary:     More documentation

Note the line that begins with “branch”. Git can’t really replicate this (and doesn’t need to; both types of branch can be represented as a Git ref), but git-remote-hg needs to understand the difference, because Mercurial cares.

Creating Mercurial bookmarks is as easy as creating Git branches. On the Git side:

$ git checkout -b featureA
Switched to a new branch 'featureA'
$ git push origin featureA
To hg::/tmp/hello
 * [new branch]      featureA -> featureA

That’s all there is to it. On the Mercurial side, it looks like this:

$ hg bookmarks
   featureA                  5:bd5ac26f11f9
$ hg log --style compact -G
@  6[tip]   8f65e5e02793   2014-08-14 20:06 -0700   ben
|    More documentation
|
o    5[featureA]:4,2   bd5ac26f11f9   2014-08-14 20:02 -0700   ben
|\     Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
| |
| o  4   0434aaa6b91f   2014-08-14 20:01 -0700   ben
| |    update makefile
| |
| o  3:1   318914536c86   2014-08-14 20:00 -0700   ben
| |    goodbye
| |
o |  2   f098c7f45c4f   2014-08-14 20:01 -0700   ben
|/     Add some documentation
|
o  1   82e55d328c8c   2005-08-26 01:21 -0700   mpm
|    Create a makefile
|
o  0   0a04b987be5a   2005-08-26 01:20 -0700   mpm
     Create a standard "hello, world" program

Note the new [featureA] tag on revision 5. These act exactly like Git branches on the Git side, with one exception: you can’t delete a bookmark from the Git side (this is a limitation of remote helpers).

You can work on a “heavyweight” Mercurial branch also: just put a branch in the branches namespace:

$ git checkout -b branches/permanent
Switched to a new branch 'branches/permanent'
$ vi Makefile
$ git commit -am 'A permanent change'
$ git push origin branches/permanent
To hg::/tmp/hello
 * [new branch]      branches/permanent -> branches/permanent

Here’s what that looks like on the Mercurial side:

$ hg branches
permanent                      7:a4529d07aad4
develop                        6:8f65e5e02793
default                        5:bd5ac26f11f9 (inactive)
$ hg log -G
o  changeset:   7:a4529d07aad4
|  branch:      permanent
|  tag:         tip
|  parent:      5:bd5ac26f11f9
|  user:        Ben Straub <ben@straub.cc>
|  date:        Thu Aug 14 20:21:09 2014 -0700
|  summary:     A permanent change
|
| @  changeset:   6:8f65e5e02793
|/   branch:      develop
|    user:        Ben Straub <ben@straub.cc>
|    date:        Thu Aug 14 20:06:38 2014 -0700
|    summary:     More documentation
|
o    changeset:   5:bd5ac26f11f9
|\   bookmark:    featureA
| |  parent:      4:0434aaa6b91f
| |  parent:      2:f098c7f45c4f
| |  user:        Ben Straub <ben@straub.cc>
| |  date:        Thu Aug 14 20:02:21 2014 -0700
| |  summary:     Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
[...]

The branch name “permanent” was recorded with the changeset marked 7.

From the Git side, working with either of these branch styles is the same: just checkout, commit, fetch, merge, pull, and push as you normally would. One thing you should know is that Mercurial doesn’t support rewriting history, only adding to it. Here’s what our Mercurial repository looks like after an interactive rebase and a force-push:

$ hg log --style compact -G
o  10[tip]   99611176cbc9   2014-08-14 20:21 -0700   ben
|    A permanent change
|
o  9   f23e12f939c3   2014-08-14 20:01 -0700   ben
|    Add some documentation
|
o  8:1   c16971d33922   2014-08-14 20:00 -0700   ben
|    goodbye
|
| o  7:5   a4529d07aad4   2014-08-14 20:21 -0700   ben
| |    A permanent change
| |
| | @  6   8f65e5e02793   2014-08-14 20:06 -0700   ben
| |/     More documentation
| |
| o    5[featureA]:4,2   bd5ac26f11f9   2014-08-14 20:02 -0700   ben
| |\     Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
| | |
| | o  4   0434aaa6b91f   2014-08-14 20:01 -0700   ben
| | |    update makefile
| | |
+---o  3:1   318914536c86   2014-08-14 20:00 -0700   ben
| |      goodbye
| |
| o  2   f098c7f45c4f   2014-08-14 20:01 -0700   ben
|/     Add some documentation
|
o  1   82e55d328c8c   2005-08-26 01:21 -0700   mpm
|    Create a makefile
|
o  0   0a04b987be5a   2005-08-26 01:20 -0700   mpm
     Create a standard "hello, world" program

Changesets 8, 9, and 10 have been created and belong to the permanent branch, but the old changesets are still there. This can be very confusing for your teammates who are using Mercurial, so try to avoid it.

Mercurial Summary

Git and Mercurial are similar enough that working across the boundary is fairly painless. If you avoid changing history that’s left your machine (as is generally recommended), you may not even be aware that the other end is Mercurial.

Git Fusion

Perforce provides a product called Git Fusion (available at http://www.perforce.com/git-fusion), which synchronizes a Perforce server with Git repositories on the server side.

Setting Up

For our examples, we’ll be using the easiest installation method for Git Fusion, which is downloading a virtual machine that runs the Perforce daemon and Git Fusion. You can get the virtual machine image from http://www.perforce.com/downloads/Perforce/20-User, and once it’s finished downloading, import it into your favorite virtualization software (we’ll use VirtualBox).

Upon first starting the machine, it asks you to customize the password for three Linux users (root, perforce, and git), and provide an instance name, which can be used to distinguish this installation from others on the same network. When that has all completed, you’ll see this:

You should take note of the IP address that’s shown here, we’ll be using it later on. Next, we’ll create a Perforce user. Select the “Login” option at the bottom and press enter (or SSH to the machine), and log in as root. Then use these commands to create a user:

$ p4 -p localhost:1666 -u super user -f john
$ p4 -p localhost:1666 -u john passwd
$ exit

The first one will open a VI editor to customize the user, but you can accept the defaults by typing :wq and hitting enter. The second one will prompt you to enter a password twice. That’s all we need to do with a shell prompt, so exit out of the session.

The next thing you’ll need to do to follow along is to tell Git not to verify SSL certificates. The Git Fusion image comes with a certificate, but it’s for a domain that won’t match your virtual machine’s IP address, so Git will reject the HTTPS connection. If this is going to be a permanent installation, consult the Perforce Git Fusion manual to install a different certificate; for our example purposes, this will suffice:

$ export GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY=true

Now we can test that everything is working.

$ git clone https://10.0.1.254/Talkhouse
Cloning into 'Talkhouse'...
Username for 'https://10.0.1.254': john
Password for 'https://john@10.0.1.254':
remote: Counting objects: 630, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (581/581), done.
remote: Total 630 (delta 172), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (630/630), 1.22 MiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (172/172), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

The virtual-machine image comes equipped with a sample project that you can clone. Here we’re cloning over HTTPS, with the john user that we created above; Git asks for credentials for this connection, but the credential cache will allow us to skip this step for any subsequent requests.

$ tree
.
├── objects
│   ├── repos
│   │   └── [...]
│   └── trees
│       └── [...]
│
├── p4gf_config
├── repos
│   └── Talkhouse
│       └── p4gf_config
└── users
    └── p4gf_usermap

498 directories, 287 files

[repo-creation]
charset = utf8

[git-to-perforce]
change-owner = author
enable-git-branch-creation = yes
enable-swarm-reviews = yes
enable-git-merge-commits = yes
enable-git-submodules = yes
preflight-commit = none
ignore-author-permissions = no
read-permission-check = none
git-merge-avoidance-after-change-num = 12107

[perforce-to-git]
http-url = none
ssh-url = none

[@features]
imports = False
chunked-push = False
matrix2 = False
parallel-push = False

[authentication]
email-case-sensitivity = no

[Talkhouse-master]
git-branch-name = master
view = //depot/Talkhouse/main-dev/... ...

[multi-project-mapping]
git-branch-name = master
view = //depot/project1/main/... project1/...
       //depot/project2/mainline/... project2/...

john john@example.com "John Doe"
john johnny@appleseed.net "John Doe"
bob employeeX@example.com "Anon X. Mouse"
joe employeeY@example.com "Anon Y. Mouse"

Workflow

Perforce Git Fusion is a two-way bridge between Perforce and Git version control. Let’s have a look at how it feels to work from the Git side. We’ll assume we’ve mapped in the “Jam” project using a configuration file as shown above, which we can clone like this:

$ git clone https://10.0.1.254/Jam
Cloning into 'Jam'...
Username for 'https://10.0.1.254': john
Password for 'https://ben@10.0.1.254':
remote: Counting objects: 2070, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1704/1704), done.
Receiving objects: 100% (2070/2070), 1.21 MiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
remote: Total 2070 (delta 1242), reused 0 (delta 0)
Resolving deltas: 100% (1242/1242), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/rel2.1
$ git log --oneline --decorate --graph --all
* 0a38c33 (origin/rel2.1) Create Jam 2.1 release branch.
| * d254865 (HEAD, origin/master, origin/HEAD, master) Upgrade to latest metrowerks on Beos -- the Intel one.
| * bd2f54a Put in fix for jam's NT handle leak.
| * c0f29e7 Fix URL in a jam doc
| * cc644ac Radstone's lynx port.
[...]

The first time you do this, it may take some time. What’s happening is that Git Fusion is converting all the applicable changesets in the Perforce history into Git commits. This happens locally on the server, so it’s relatively fast, but if you have a lot of history, it can still take some time. Subsequent fetches do incremental conversion, so it’ll feel more like Git’s native speed.

As you can see, our repository looks exactly like any other Git repository you might work with. There are three branches, and Git has helpfully created a local master branch that tracks origin/master. Let’s do a bit of work, and create a couple of new commits:

# ...
$ git log --oneline --decorate --graph --all
* cfd46ab (HEAD, master) Add documentation for new feature
* a730d77 Whitespace
* d254865 (origin/master, origin/HEAD) Upgrade to latest metrowerks on Beos -- the Intel one.
* bd2f54a Put in fix for jam's NT handle leak.
[...]

We have two new commits. Now let’s check if anyone else has been working:

$ git fetch
remote: Counting objects: 5, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
From https://10.0.1.254/Jam
   d254865..6afeb15  master     -> origin/master
$ git log --oneline --decorate --graph --all
* 6afeb15 (origin/master, origin/HEAD) Update copyright
| * cfd46ab (HEAD, master) Add documentation for new feature
| * a730d77 Whitespace
|/
* d254865 Upgrade to latest metrowerks on Beos -- the Intel one.
* bd2f54a Put in fix for jam's NT handle leak.
[...]

It looks like someone was! You wouldn’t know it from this view, but the 6afeb15 commit was actually created using a Perforce client. It just looks like another commit from Git’s point of view, which is exactly the point. Let’s see how the Perforce server deals with a merge commit:

$ git merge origin/master
Auto-merging README
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
 README | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
$ git push
Counting objects: 9, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (9/9), done.
Writing objects: 100% (9/9), 917 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 9 (delta 6), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Perforce: 100% (3/3) Loading commit tree into memory...
remote: Perforce: 100% (5/5) Finding child commits...
remote: Perforce: Running git fast-export...
remote: Perforce: 100% (3/3) Checking commits...
remote: Processing will continue even if connection is closed.
remote: Perforce: 100% (3/3) Copying changelists...
remote: Perforce: Submitting new Git commit objects to Perforce: 4
To https://10.0.1.254/Jam
   6afeb15..89cba2b  master -> master

Git thinks it worked. Let’s take a look at the history of the README file from Perforce’s point of view, using the revision graph feature of p4v:

If you’ve never seen this view before, it may seem confusing, but it shows the same concepts as a graphical viewer for Git history. We’re looking at the history of the README file, so the directory tree at top left only shows that file as it surfaces in various branches. At top right, we have a visual graph of how different revisions of the file are related, and the big-picture view of this graph is at bottom right. The rest of the view is given to the details view for the selected revision (2 in this case).

One thing to notice is that the graph looks exactly like the one in Git’s history. Perforce didn’t have a named branch to store the 1 and 2 commits, so it made an “anonymous” branch in the .git-fusion directory to hold it. This will also happen for named Git branches that don’t correspond to a named Perforce branch (and you can later map them to a Perforce branch using the configuration file).

Most of this happens behind the scenes, but the end result is that one person on a team can be using Git, another can be using Perforce, and neither of them will know about the other’s choice.

Git-p4

Git-p4 is a two-way bridge between Git and Perforce. It runs entirely inside your Git repository, so you won’t need any kind of access to the Perforce server (other than user credentials, of course). Git-p4 isn’t as flexible or complete a solution as Git Fusion, but it does allow you to do most of what you’d want to do without being invasive to the server environment.

$ export P4PORT=10.0.1.254:1666
$ export P4USER=john

$ git p4 clone //depot/www/live www-shallow
Importing from //depot/www/live into www-shallow
Initialized empty Git repository in /private/tmp/www-shallow/.git/
Doing initial import of //depot/www/live/ from revision #head into refs/remotes/p4/master

$ cd myproject
$ git log --oneline --all --graph --decorate
* 70eaf78 (HEAD, p4/master, p4/HEAD, master) Initial import of //depot/www/live/ from the state at revision #head

$ git remote -v

$ git log --oneline --all --graph --decorate
* 018467c (HEAD, master) Change page title
* c0fb617 Update link
* 70eaf78 (p4/master, p4/HEAD) Initial import of //depot/www/live/ from the state at revision #head

$ git p4 sync
git p4 sync
Performing incremental import into refs/remotes/p4/master git branch
Depot paths: //depot/www/live/
Import destination: refs/remotes/p4/master
Importing revision 12142 (100%)
$ git log --oneline --all --graph --decorate
* 75cd059 (p4/master, p4/HEAD) Update copyright
| * 018467c (HEAD, master) Change page title
| * c0fb617 Update link
|/
* 70eaf78 Initial import of //depot/www/live/ from the state at revision #head

$ git p4 rebase
Performing incremental import into refs/remotes/p4/master git branch
Depot paths: //depot/www/live/
No changes to import!
Rebasing the current branch onto remotes/p4/master
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Applying: Update link
Applying: Change page title
 index.html | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

# A Perforce Change Specification.
#
#  Change:      The change number. 'new' on a new changelist.
#  Date:        The date this specification was last modified.
#  Client:      The client on which the changelist was created.  Read-only.
#  User:        The user who created the changelist.
#  Status:      Either 'pending' or 'submitted'. Read-only.
#  Type:        Either 'public' or 'restricted'. Default is 'public'.
#  Description: Comments about the changelist.  Required.
#  Jobs:        What opened jobs are to be closed by this changelist.
#               You may delete jobs from this list.  (New changelists only.)
#  Files:       What opened files from the default changelist are to be added
#               to this changelist.  You may delete files from this list.
#               (New changelists only.)

Change:  new

Client:  john_bens-mbp_8487

User: john

Status:  new

Description:
   Update link

Files:
   //depot/www/live/index.html   # edit


######## git author ben@straub.cc does not match your p4 account.
######## Use option --preserve-user to modify authorship.
######## Variable git-p4.skipUserNameCheck hides this message.
######## everything below this line is just the diff #######
--- //depot/www/live/index.html  2014-08-31 18:26:05.000000000 0000
+++ /Users/ben/john_bens-mbp_8487/john_bens-mbp_8487/depot/www/live/index.html   2014-08-31 18:26:05.000000000 0000
@@ -60,7 +60,7 @@
 </td>
 <td valign=top>
 Source and documentation for
-<a href="http://www.perforce.com/jam/jam.html">
+<a href="jam.html">
 Jam/MR</a>,
 a software build tool.
 </td>

$ git p4 submit
Perforce checkout for depot path //depot/www/live/ located at /Users/ben/john_bens-mbp_8487/john_bens-mbp_8487/depot/www/live/
Synchronizing p4 checkout...
... - file(s) up-to-date.
Applying dbac45b Update link
//depot/www/live/index.html#4 - opened for edit
Change 12143 created with 1 open file(s).
Submitting change 12143.
Locking 1 files ...
edit //depot/www/live/index.html#5
Change 12143 submitted.
Applying 905ec6a Change page title
//depot/www/live/index.html#5 - opened for edit
Change 12144 created with 1 open file(s).
Submitting change 12144.
Locking 1 files ...
edit //depot/www/live/index.html#6
Change 12144 submitted.
All commits applied!
Performing incremental import into refs/remotes/p4/master git branch
Depot paths: //depot/www/live/
Import destination: refs/remotes/p4/master
Importing revision 12144 (100%)
Rebasing the current branch onto remotes/p4/master
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
$ git log --oneline --all --graph --decorate
* 775a46f (HEAD, p4/master, p4/HEAD, master) Change page title
* 05f1ade Update link
* 75cd059 Update copyright
* 70eaf78 Initial import of //depot/www/live/ from the state at revision #head

$ git log -1
commit 775a46f630d8b46535fc9983cf3ebe6b9aa53145
Author: John Doe <john@example.com>
Date:   Sun Aug 31 10:31:44 2014 -0800

    Change page title

    [git-p4: depot-paths = "//depot/www/live/": change = 12144]

$ git log --oneline --all --graph --decorate
* 3be6fd8 (HEAD, master) Correct email address
*   1dcbf21 Merge remote-tracking branch 'p4/master'
|\
| * c4689fc (p4/master, p4/HEAD) Grammar fix
* | cbacd0a Table borders: yes please
* | b4959b6 Trademark
|/
* 775a46f Change page title
* 05f1ade Update link
* 75cd059 Update copyright
* 70eaf78 Initial import of //depot/www/live/ from the state at revision #head

$ git p4 submit -n
Perforce checkout for depot path //depot/www/live/ located at /Users/ben/john_bens-mbp_8487/john_bens-mbp_8487/depot/www/live/
Would synchronize p4 checkout in /Users/ben/john_bens-mbp_8487/john_bens-mbp_8487/depot/www/live/
Would apply
  b4959b6 Trademark
  cbacd0a Table borders: yes please
  3be6fd8 Correct email address

$ git p4 submit
[…]
$ git log --oneline --all --graph --decorate
* dadbd89 (HEAD, p4/master, p4/HEAD, master) Correct email address
* 1b79a80 Table borders: yes please
* 0097235 Trademark
* c4689fc Grammar fix
* 775a46f Change page title
* 05f1ade Update link
* 75cd059 Update copyright
* 70eaf78 Initial import of //depot/www/live/ from the state at revision #head

//depot
  └── project
      ├── main
      └── dev

//depot/project/main/... //depot/project/dev/...

$ git p4 clone --detect-branches //depot/project@all
Importing from //depot/project@all into project
Initialized empty Git repository in /private/tmp/project/.git/
Importing revision 20 (50%)
    Importing new branch project/dev

    Resuming with change 20
Importing revision 22 (100%)
Updated branches: main dev
$ cd project; git log --oneline --all --graph --decorate
* eae77ae (HEAD, p4/master, p4/HEAD, master) main
| * 10d55fb (p4/project/dev) dev
| * a43cfae Populate //depot/project/main/... //depot/project/dev/....
|/
* 2b83451 Project init

$ git init project
Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/project/.git/
$ cd project
$ git config git-p4.branchList main:dev
$ git clone --detect-branches //depot/project@all .

Git and Perforce Summary

Git-p4 makes it possible to use a Git workflow with a Perforce server, and it’s pretty good at it. However, it’s important to remember that Perforce is in charge of the source, and you’re only using Git to work locally. Just be really careful about sharing Git commits; if you have a remote that other people use, don’t push any commits that haven’t already been submitted to the Perforce server.

If you want to freely mix the use of Perforce and Git as clients for source control, and you can convince the server administrator to install it, Git Fusion makes using Git a first-class version-control client for a Perforce server.

Which Tool

In fact, there are two: git-tf and git-tfs.

Git-tfs (found at https://github.com/git-tfs/git-tfs) is a .NET project, and (as of this writing) it only runs on Windows. To work with Git repositories, it uses the .NET bindings for libgit2, a library-oriented implementation of Git which is highly performant and allows a lot of flexibility with the guts of a Git repository. Libgit2 is not a complete implementation of Git, so to cover the difference git-tfs will actually call the command-line Git client for some operations, so there are no artificial limits on what it can do with Git repositories. Its support of TFVC features is very mature, since it uses the Visual Studio assemblies for operations with servers. This does mean you’ll need access to those assemblies, which means you need to install a recent version of Visual Studio (any edition since version 2010, including Express since version 2012), or the Visual Studio SDK.

Git-tf (whose home is at https://gittf.codeplex.com) is a Java project, and as such runs on any computer with a Java runtime environment. It interfaces with Git repositories through JGit (a JVM implementation of Git), which means it has virtually no limitations in terms of Git functions. However, its support for TFVC is limited as compared to git-tfs – it does not support branches, for instance.

So each tool has pros and cons, and there are plenty of situations that favor one over the other. We’ll cover the basic usage of both of them in this book.

Getting Started: git-tf

The first thing you do, just as with any Git project, is clone. Here’s what that looks like with git-tf:

$ git tf clone https://tfs.codeplex.com:443/tfs/TFS13 $/myproject/Main project_git

The first argument is the URL of a TFVC collection, the second is of the form $/project/branch, and the third is the path to the local Git repository that is to be created (this last one is optional). Git-tf can only work with one branch at a time; if you want to make checkins on a different TFVC branch, you’ll have to make a new clone from that branch.

This creates a fully functional Git repository:

$ cd project_git
$ git log --all --oneline --decorate
512e75a (HEAD, tag: TFS_C35190, origin_tfs/tfs, master) Checkin message

This is called a shallow clone, meaning that only the latest changeset has been downloaded. TFVC isn’t designed for each client to have a full copy of the history, so git-tf defaults to only getting the latest version, which is much faster.

If you have some time, it’s probably worth it to clone the entire project history, using the --deep option:

$ git tf clone https://tfs.codeplex.com:443/tfs/TFS13 $/myproject/Main \
  project_git --deep
Username: domain\user
Password:
Connecting to TFS...
Cloning $/myproject into /tmp/project_git: 100%, done.
Cloned 4 changesets. Cloned last changeset 35190 as d44b17a
$ cd project_git
$ git log --all --oneline --decorate
d44b17a (HEAD, tag: TFS_C35190, origin_tfs/tfs, master) Goodbye
126aa7b (tag: TFS_C35189)
8f77431 (tag: TFS_C35178) FIRST
0745a25 (tag: TFS_C35177) Created team project folder $/tfvctest via the \
        Team Project Creation Wizard

Notice the tags with names like TFS_C35189; this is a feature that helps you know which Git commits are associated with TFVC changesets. This is a nice way to represent it, since you can see with a simple log command which of your commits is associated with a snapshot that also exists in TFVC. They aren’t necessary (and in fact you can turn them off with git config git-tf.tag false) – git-tf keeps the real commit-changeset mappings in the .git/git-tf file.

Getting Started: git-tfs

Git-tfs cloning behaves a bit differently. Observe:

PS> git tfs clone --with-branches \
    https://username.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection \
    $/project/Trunk project_git
Initialized empty Git repository in C:/Users/ben/project_git/.git/
C15 = b75da1aba1ffb359d00e85c52acb261e4586b0c9
C16 = c403405f4989d73a2c3c119e79021cb2104ce44a
Tfs branches found:
- $/tfvc-test/featureA
The name of the local branch will be : featureA
C17 = d202b53f67bde32171d5078968c644e562f1c439
C18 = 44cd729d8df868a8be20438fdeeefb961958b674

Notice the --with-branches flag. Git-tfs is capable of mapping TFVC branches to Git branches, and this flag tells it to set up a local Git branch for every TFVC branch. This is highly recommended if you’ve ever branched or merged in TFS, but it won’t work with a server older than TFS 2010 – before that release, “branches” were just folders, so git-tfs can’t tell them from regular folders.

Let’s take a look at the resulting Git repository:

PS> git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all
* 44cd729 (tfs/featureA, featureA) Goodbye
* d202b53 Branched from $/tfvc-test/Trunk
* c403405 (HEAD, tfs/default, master) Hello
* b75da1a New project
PS> git log -1
commit c403405f4989d73a2c3c119e79021cb2104ce44a
Author: Ben Straub <ben@straub.cc>
Date:   Fri Aug 1 03:41:59 2014 +0000

    Hello

    git-tfs-id: [https://username.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection]$/myproject/Trunk;C16

There are two local branches, master and featureA, which represent the initial starting point of the clone (Trunk in TFVC) and a child branch (featureA in TFVC). You can also see that the tfs “remote” has a couple of refs too: default and featureA, which represent TFVC branches. Git-tfs maps the branch you cloned from to tfs/default, and others get their own names.

Another thing to notice is the git-tfs-id: lines in the commit messages. Instead of tags, git-tfs uses these markers to relate TFVC changesets to Git commits. This has the implication that your Git commits will have a different SHA-1 hash before and after they have been pushed to TFVC.

Git-tf[s] Workflow

$ git config set --local core.ignorecase=true
$ git config set --local core.autocrlf=false

The obvious next thing you’re going to want to do is work on the project. TFVC and TFS have several features that may add complexity to your workflow:

1. Feature branches that aren’t represented in TFVC add a bit of complexity. This has to do with the very different ways that TFVC and Git represent branches.

2. Be aware that TFVC allows users to “checkout” files from the server, locking them so nobody else can edit them. This obviously won’t stop you from editing them in your local repository, but it could get in the way when it comes time to push your changes up to the TFVC server.

3. TFS has the concept of “gated” checkins, where a TFS build-test cycle has to complete successfully before the checkin is allowed. This uses the “shelve” function in TFVC, which we don’t cover in detail here. You can fake this in a manual fashion with git-tf, and git-tfs provides the checkintool command which is gate-aware.

In the interest of brevity, what we’ll cover here is the happy path, which sidesteps or avoids most of these issues.

Workflow: git-tf

Let’s say you’ve done some work, made a couple of Git commits on master, and you’re ready to share your progress on the TFVC server. Here’s our Git repository:

$ git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all
* 4178a82 (HEAD, master) update code
* 9df2ae3 update readme
* d44b17a (tag: TFS_C35190, origin_tfs/tfs) Goodbye
* 126aa7b (tag: TFS_C35189)
* 8f77431 (tag: TFS_C35178) FIRST
* 0745a25 (tag: TFS_C35177) Created team project folder $/tfvctest via the \
          Team Project Creation Wizard

We want to take the snapshot that’s in the 4178a82 commit and push it up to the TFVC server. First things first: let’s see if any of our teammates did anything since we last connected:

$ git tf fetch
Username: domain\user
Password:
Connecting to TFS...
Fetching $/myproject at latest changeset: 100%, done.
Downloaded changeset 35320 as commit 8ef06a8. Updated FETCH_HEAD.
$ git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all
* 8ef06a8 (tag: TFS_C35320, origin_tfs/tfs) just some text
| * 4178a82 (HEAD, master) update code
| * 9df2ae3 update readme
|/
* d44b17a (tag: TFS_C35190) Goodbye
* 126aa7b (tag: TFS_C35189)
* 8f77431 (tag: TFS_C35178) FIRST
* 0745a25 (tag: TFS_C35177) Created team project folder $/tfvctest via the \
          Team Project Creation Wizard

Looks like someone else is working, too, and now we have divergent history. This is where Git shines, but we have two choices of how to proceed:

1. Making a merge commit feels natural as a Git user (after all, that’s what git pull does), and git-tf can do this for you with a simple git tf pull. Be aware, however, that TFVC doesn’t think this way, and if you push merge commits your history will start to look different on both sides, which can be confusing. However, if you plan on submitting all of your changes as one changeset, this is probably the easiest choice.

2. Rebasing makes our commit history linear, which means we have the option of converting each of our Git commits into a TFVC changeset. Since this leaves the most options open, we recommend you do it this way; git-tf even makes it easy for you with git tf pull --rebase.

The choice is yours. For this example, we’ll be rebasing:

$ git rebase FETCH_HEAD
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Applying: update readme
Applying: update code
$ git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all
* 5a0e25e (HEAD, master) update code
* 6eb3eb5 update readme
* 8ef06a8 (tag: TFS_C35320, origin_tfs/tfs) just some text
* d44b17a (tag: TFS_C35190) Goodbye
* 126aa7b (tag: TFS_C35189)
* 8f77431 (tag: TFS_C35178) FIRST
* 0745a25 (tag: TFS_C35177) Created team project folder $/tfvctest via the \
          Team Project Creation Wizard

Now we’re ready to make a checkin to the TFVC server. Git-tf gives you the choice of making a single changeset that represents all the changes since the last one (--shallow, which is the default) and creating a new changeset for each Git commit (--deep). For this example, we’ll just create one changeset:

$ git tf checkin -m 'Updating readme and code'
Username: domain\user
Password:
Connecting to TFS...
Checking in to $/myproject: 100%, done.
Checked commit 5a0e25e in as changeset 35348
$ git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all
* 5a0e25e (HEAD, tag: TFS_C35348, origin_tfs/tfs, master) update code
* 6eb3eb5 update readme
* 8ef06a8 (tag: TFS_C35320) just some text
* d44b17a (tag: TFS_C35190) Goodbye
* 126aa7b (tag: TFS_C35189)
* 8f77431 (tag: TFS_C35178) FIRST
* 0745a25 (tag: TFS_C35177) Created team project folder $/tfvctest via the \
          Team Project Creation Wizard

There’s a new TFS_C35348 tag, indicating that TFVC is storing the exact same snapshot as the 5a0e25e commit. It’s important to note that not every Git commit needs to have an exact counterpart in TFVC; the 6eb3eb5 commit, for example, doesn’t exist anywhere on the server.

That’s the main workflow. There are a couple of other considerations you’ll want to keep in mind:

• There is no branching. Git-tf can only create Git repositories from one TFVC branch at a time.

• Collaborate using either TFVC or Git, but not both. Different git-tf clones of the same TFVC repository may have different commit SHA-1 hashes, which will cause no end of headaches.

• If your team’s workflow includes collaborating in Git and syncing periodically with TFVC, only connect to TFVC with one of the Git repositories.

Workflow: git-tfs

Let’s walk through the same scenario using git-tfs. Here are the new commits we’ve made to the master branch in our Git repository:

PS> git log --oneline --graph --all --decorate
* c3bd3ae (HEAD, master) update code
* d85e5a2 update readme
| * 44cd729 (tfs/featureA, featureA) Goodbye
| * d202b53 Branched from $/tfvc-test/Trunk
|/
* c403405 (tfs/default) Hello
* b75da1a New project

Now let’s see if anyone else has done work while we were hacking away:

PS> git tfs fetch
C19 = aea74a0313de0a391940c999e51c5c15c381d91d
PS> git log --all --oneline --graph --decorate
* aea74a0 (tfs/default) update documentation
| * c3bd3ae (HEAD, master) update code
| * d85e5a2 update readme
|/
| * 44cd729 (tfs/featureA, featureA) Goodbye
| * d202b53 Branched from $/tfvc-test/Trunk
|/
* c403405 Hello
* b75da1a New project

Yes, it turns out our coworker has added a new TFVC changeset, which shows up as the new aea74a0 commit, and the tfs/default remote branch has moved.

As with git-tf, we have two fundamental options for how to resolve this divergent history:

1. Rebase to preserve a linear history.

2. Merge to preserve what actually happened.

In this case, we’re going to do a “deep” checkin, where every Git commit becomes a TFVC changeset, so we want to rebase.

PS> git rebase tfs/default
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Applying: update readme
Applying: update code
PS> git log --all --oneline --graph --decorate
* 10a75ac (HEAD, master) update code
* 5cec4ab update readme
* aea74a0 (tfs/default) update documentation
| * 44cd729 (tfs/featureA, featureA) Goodbye
| * d202b53 Branched from $/tfvc-test/Trunk
|/
* c403405 Hello
* b75da1a New project

Now we’re ready to complete our contribution by checking in our code to the TFVC server. We’ll use the rcheckin command here to create a TFVC changeset for each Git commit in the path from HEAD to the first tfs remote branch found (the checkin command would only create one changeset, sort of like squashing Git commits).

PS> git tfs rcheckin
Working with tfs remote: default
Fetching changes from TFS to minimize possibility of late conflict...
Starting checkin of 5cec4ab4 'update readme'
 add README.md
C20 = 71a5ddce274c19f8fdc322b4f165d93d89121017
Done with 5cec4ab4b213c354341f66c80cd650ab98dcf1ed, rebasing tail onto new TFS-commit...
Rebase done successfully.
Starting checkin of b1bf0f99 'update code'
 edit .git\tfs\default\workspace\ConsoleApplication1/ConsoleApplication1/Program.cs
C21 = ff04e7c35dfbe6a8f94e782bf5e0031cee8d103b
Done with b1bf0f9977b2d48bad611ed4a03d3738df05ea5d, rebasing tail onto new TFS-commit...
Rebase done successfully.
No more to rcheckin.
PS> git log --all --oneline --graph --decorate
* ff04e7c (HEAD, tfs/default, master) update code
* 71a5ddc update readme
* aea74a0 update documentation
| * 44cd729 (tfs/featureA, featureA) Goodbye
| * d202b53 Branched from $/tfvc-test/Trunk
|/
* c403405 Hello
* b75da1a New project

Notice how after every successful checkin to the TFVC server, git-tfs is rebasing the remaining work onto what it just did. That’s because it’s adding the git-tfs-id field to the bottom of the commit messages, which changes the SHA-1 hashes. This is exactly as designed, and there’s nothing to worry about, but you should be aware that it’s happening, especially if you’re sharing Git commits with others.

TFS has many features that integrate with its version control system, such as work items, designated reviewers, gated checkins, and so on. It can be cumbersome to work with these features using only a command-line tool, but fortunately git-tfs lets you launch a graphical checkin tool very easily:

PS> git tfs checkintool
PS> git tfs ct

It looks a bit like this:

This will look familiar to TFS users, as it’s the same dialog that’s launched from within Visual Studio.

Git-tfs also lets you control TFVC branches from your Git repository. As an example, let’s create one:

PS> git tfs branch $/tfvc-test/featureBee
The name of the local branch will be : featureBee
C26 = 1d54865c397608c004a2cadce7296f5edc22a7e5
PS> git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all
* 1d54865 (tfs/featureBee) Creation branch $/myproject/featureBee
* ff04e7c (HEAD, tfs/default, master) update code
* 71a5ddc update readme
* aea74a0 update documentation
| * 44cd729 (tfs/featureA, featureA) Goodbye
| * d202b53 Branched from $/tfvc-test/Trunk
|/
* c403405 Hello
* b75da1a New project

Creating a branch in TFVC means adding a changeset where that branch now exists, and this is projected as a Git commit. Note also that git-tfs created the tfs/featureBee remote branch, but HEAD is still pointing to master. If you want to work on the newly-minted branch, you’ll want to base your new commits on the 1d54865 commit, perhaps by creating a topic branch from that commit.

Git and TFS Summary

Git-tf and Git-tfs are both great tools for interfacing with a TFVC server. They allow you to use the power of Git locally, avoid constantly having to round-trip to the central TFVC server, and make your life as a developer much easier, without forcing your entire team to migrate to Git. If you’re working on Windows (which is likely if your team is using TFS), you’ll probably want to use git-tfs, since its feature set is more complete, but if you’re working on another platform, you’ll be using git-tf, which is more limited. As with most of the tools in this chapter, you should choose one of these version-control systems to be canonical, and use the other one in a subordinate fashion – either Git or TFVC should be the center of collaboration, but not both.

Perforce Git Fusion

Git Fusion makes this process fairly painless. Just configure your project settings, user mappings, and branches using a configuration file (as discussed in Git Fusion), and clone the repository. Git Fusion leaves you with what looks like a native Git repository, which is then ready to push to a native Git host if you desire. You could even use Perforce as your Git host if you like.

Git-p4

Git-p4 can also act as an import tool. As an example, we’ll import the Jam project from the Perforce Public Depot. To set up your client, you must export the P4PORT environment variable to point to the Perforce depot:

$ export P4PORT=public.perforce.com:1666

Run the git p4 clone command to import the Jam project from the Perforce server, supplying the depot and project path and the path into which you want to import the project:

$ git-p4 clone //guest/perforce_software/jam@all p4import
Importing from //guest/perforce_software/jam@all into p4import
Initialized empty Git repository in /private/tmp/p4import/.git/
Import destination: refs/remotes/p4/master
Importing revision 9957 (100%)

This particular project has only one branch, but if you have branches that are configured with branch views (or just a set of directories), you can use the --detect-branches flag to git p4 clone to import all the project’s branches as well. See Branching for a bit more detail on this.

At this point you’re almost done. If you go to the p4import directory and run git log, you can see your imported work:

$ git log -2
commit e5da1c909e5db3036475419f6379f2c73710c4e6
Author: giles <giles@giles@perforce.com>
Date:   Wed Feb 8 03:13:27 2012 -0800

    Correction to line 355; change </UL> to </OL>.

    [git-p4: depot-paths = "//public/jam/src/": change = 8068]

commit aa21359a0a135dda85c50a7f7cf249e4f7b8fd98
Author: kwirth <kwirth@perforce.com>
Date:   Tue Jul 7 01:35:51 2009 -0800

    Fix spelling error on Jam doc page (cummulative -> cumulative).

    [git-p4: depot-paths = "//public/jam/src/": change = 7304]

You can see that git-p4 has left an identifier in each commit message. It’s fine to keep that identifier there, in case you need to reference the Perforce change number later. However, if you’d like to remove the identifier, now is the time to do so – before you start doing work on the new repository. You can use git filter-branch to remove the identifier strings en masse:

$ git filter-branch --msg-filter 'sed -e "/^\[git-p4:/d"'
Rewrite e5da1c909e5db3036475419f6379f2c73710c4e6 (125/125)
Ref 'refs/heads/master' was rewritten

If you run git log, you can see that all the SHA-1 checksums for the commits have changed, but the git-p4 strings are no longer in the commit messages:

$ git log -2
commit b17341801ed838d97f7800a54a6f9b95750839b7
Author: giles <giles@giles@perforce.com>
Date:   Wed Feb 8 03:13:27 2012 -0800

    Correction to line 355; change </UL> to </OL>.

commit 3e68c2e26cd89cb983eb52c024ecdfba1d6b3fff
Author: kwirth <kwirth@perforce.com>
Date:   Tue Jul 7 01:35:51 2009 -0800

    Fix spelling error on Jam doc page (cummulative -> cumulative).

Your import is ready to push up to your new Git server.