Installing Perforce on Linux is a strange one.  The first strange thing you'll notice is that when you download the server all you're downloading is a binary.  One binary.  No tar, no rpm, no readme, no configuration files.  Just the single p4d binary.

After that, you'll want to copy this binary into your typical binary server directory.  On my systems, that's /usr/sbin.  Then you'll want to make it executable.  (e.g. "chmod +x /usr/sbin/p4d")  Finally, you'll want to actually set it so it launches at startup and you'll probably want it to launch right away.

To do this you must ... (alright, I haven't done this yet).

Another important, but optional, item is to configure a cron task to backup the database regularly.

To do this, you can ... (yeah, this hasn't been done yet, either).

Migration from Windows to Linux is another problem.  Windows is case-insensitive but Perforce stores the names in it's database with case.  Under Linux, it'll try to find the names assuming the case it stored.  Unfortunately, it also stores the names on the Windows system in lower case.  When you run a p4 verify command, it'll list any file with uppercase in it's name or path as missing.  This output is ripe for a script...

The first thing you must do is finish the migration.  When you've run the "p4 verify //..." and you see some "MISSING!" files, the following script may serve as a good starting point for fixing up the naming of the files.  Of course, you've backed up and know what you are doing and understand perl and all the other disclaimers.  The output from the "p4 verify //..." needs to go in the text file that is being opened (e.g. "p4vout.txt" in this script).

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

open (my $fh, "p4vout.txt") or die "No file.\n";

my @lines = <$fh>;

my $num = 0;
my $fatals = 0;
foreach my $line (@lines)
{

    # only the first instance of a file is needed
    # only ones that are MISSING! are needed
    if ($line =~ m/^\/\/(.*)\#1.*MISSING\!/)
    {
    print ++$num.": [". $line . "]\n";
    # $1 now contains the depot path withhout the leading "//"
    print "orig: $1\n";
    my $src = "./".lc($1);
    my $dst = "./".$1;

    my @fparts = split("/", $dst);
    my $name = pop @fparts;
    my $path = join("/", @fparts);
    print "name [$name] -- path [$path]\n";
    print "mkdir -p \"$path\"\n";
    system ("mkdir","-p", "$path") == 0  or die("Failed to mkdir!");
    if (-e "$src,v" || -e "$src,d")
    {
        print "mv: $src $dst\n";
        rename ("$src,v", "$dst,v" ) or rename("$src,d", "$dst,d") or die("Failed to rename!!");
        # undo
        #rename ("$dst,v", "$src,v") or rename("$dst,d", "$src,v") or die ("Didn't undo!!");
    }
    elsif (-e "$dst,v" || -e "$dst,d")
    {
       
        #print "[$src,v] or [$src,d] does not exist\n";
        print "File already moved.\n";
    }
    else
    {
        print "Oops\nline=[$line].\n";
        print "Possible fatal errors: ".++$fatals."\n";
    }
    }
}
print "Fatals: $fatals\n";

Posted by Shane on April 10, 2006 10:04 PM | Permalink