Question

At work we use perforce and are encouraged to make regular commits to it (something I am fine with). However, I’d like to run something like mercurial so I can locally commit stuff that is work in progress and doesn’t necessarily compile/run and then from this do my regular commits to the central perforce server.

My question here is kind of two-fold, first off, does anyone know how well Visual Studio would cope with multiple source control bindings (ideally I want everything to be as autonomous as possible – hey, I’m lazy:))

And secondly, are there any tools available that would allow me to do something as simple as “Check current head of mercurial repository in to perforce”.

I seem to recall GIT allows you to do something similar to this, and I’m not entirely against trying it out.

If I’ve missed out anything obvious or am thinking about this in entirely the wrong way, please feel free to berate me 😉

Cheers

Answer 1

The interest of your idea is not so much in the private commits as it would be in the “off-line development”: Mercurial or Git would allow you to work even if not connected to the central Perforce repository.

But regarding branching, they are easier to create or merge with Hg or Git, so it could be an idea.
The principle would be to create your Hg or Git repo right in your Perforce workspace.

This article using mercurial with perforce (or some other centralized vcs) does illustrate a similar approach:

If the code is already in perforce, I’ll pull down a copy and hg init a local repository; otherwise I’ll init using mercurial and check into perforce later (typically this is for a spike).
The I’ll do some work, committing as I go to mercurial.
My perforce commit tends to be a rollup of smaller hg commits, alternatively if I want to track changes specifically I’ll check in the individual hg commits by rolling forward the history using “hg update” (some more on this below).
Don’t commit the .hg folder into perforce by the way