On 29 May 2018 at 22:21, Jonathan Nieder <jrnie...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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?
Not as far as I know. I could start the ball rolling with a bug report. I guess the question is how many people would actually use it. > >> 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. Thanks! I think the git-p4 client is the thing that's really useful (at least to people like me) but I've only very recently learned that the p4 client had been open-sourced. Luke
