forcemerge 715534 900377 quit Hi,
Luke Diamand wrote: > Originally the Debian git package included this tool, but it was removed > in 2014 because - at the time - the Perforce command-line tool was non-free: > > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=715534#10 To be clear, what the Debian git package included before was a script of a few lines that said that git was built without support for Python. I don't believe the Debian git package ever included git-p4. > However, later that year, Perforce actually open-sourced a good deal of > their software, including the p4 command-line client which git-p4 relies > on: > > https://www.perforce.com/press-releases/perforce-open-sources-popular-version-control-tools > > The source can currently be found here: > > https://swarm.workshop.perforce.com/files/guest/perforce_software/p4/ > > and the license (as of the 2018-1 branch) is here: > > https://swarm.workshop.perforce.com/files/guest/perforce_software/p4/2018-1/LICENSE > > That appears to be a standard BSD license (2-part). Cool! Is there a bug open to package p4 in Debian? > I found that I could build the code on a recent Debian install with a > few small hacks (I think it assumes an older version of openssl than > that shipped with current Debian). > > Given this, I think git could once again include the git-p4 package. > That would be very useful for people in organizations where Perforce is > in use for version control, but who would prefer to use the standard git > frontend (and for whatever reason can't use Perforce's own git-fusion > tool). Thanks for the update. Given this context, it certainly seems worth adding git-p4 to contrib for now, and to the main Debian repository once the perforce client is in Debian. It's too bad the server isn't also open source, but as long as the protocol spec is open and implementable, that's not a reason not to include the client in Debian. I'll look into it this week. Thanks for your kind and patient help, Jonathan
