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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T18:25:30+00:00

I’m trying to import a project from my company’s Perforce depot into a git

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I’m trying to import a project from my company’s Perforce depot into a git repository. I’ve been successful getting a single branch into a single git repo, but what I’d like to do is to pull in the entire project plus all branches, but I can’t get it working correctly.

I have my .p4settings file:

P4PORT=perforce-server.local:1666
P4USER=my.username
P4CLIENT=my.clientspec.name

Clientspec is fairly simple:

//project/... //my.clientspec.name/project/...
-//project/External/... //my.clientspec.name/project/External/...

The second line is to exclude the external library binaries from the checkout.

I use the following command line to start git-p4 importing:

git p4 clone --verbose --detect-branches --max-changes=100 //project/...@all

This goes through and checks all the branch names, etc, and attempts to import starting at the first commit (This particular projects begins at changelist 771)

Importing from //project/...@all into project
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/grant/Development/git_test/project/.git/
Reading pipe: git config git-p4.useclientspec
Reading pipe: git config git-p4.user
Reading pipe: git config git-p4.password
Reading pipe: git config git-p4.port
Reading pipe: git config git-p4.host
Reading pipe: git config git-p4.client
p4 -G branches
Opening pipe: p4 -G branches
p4 -G branch -o branch-1
Opening pipe: p4 -G branch -o branch-1
Reading pipe: git config --bool core.ignorecase
p4 -G branch -o branch-2
...
Opening pipe: p4 -G branch -o branch-n
p4-git branches: []
initial parents: {}

I’m not sure if p4-git branches, and initial parents are supposed to be empty here, but they are.

Finally we get to the point where it’s about to start importing changelists into git and the following happens:

Getting p4 changes for //project/...
p4 changes //project/...
Reading pipe: p4 changes //project/...
p4 -G describe 771
Opening pipe: p4 -G describe 771
Importing revision 771 (1%)branch is MAIN

    Importing new branch RCMerge/MAIN
p4 changes //RCMerge/MAIN/...@1,770
Reading pipe: p4 changes //RCMerge/MAIN/...@1,770

    Resuming with change 771
parent determined through known branches: Branch-foo
looking for initial parent for refs/remotes/p4/project/MAIN; current parent is refs/remotes/p4/project/Branch-foo
commit into refs/remotes/p4/project/MAIN
parent refs/remotes/p4/project/Branch-foo
p4 -G -x - print
Opening pipe: p4 -G -x - print
Glue/source/.empty
fatal: Invalid ref name or SHA1 expression: refs/remotes/p4/project/Branch-foo
fast-import: dumping crash report to .git/fast_import_crash_26002

Here’s the file referenced above:

fast-import crash report:
    fast-import process: 26002
    parent process     : 26000
    at Thu May 19 11:51:54 2011

fatal: Invalid ref name or SHA1 expression: refs/remotes/p4/project/Branch-foo

Most Recent Commands Before Crash
---------------------------------
  checkpoint
  commit refs/remotes/p4/project/MAIN
  committer Some User <some.user@domain.com> 1253574589 -0800
  data <<EOT
* from refs/remotes/p4/project/Branch-foo

Active Branch LRU
-----------------
    active_branches = 0 cur, 5 max

  pos  clock name
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Inactive Branches
-----------------
refs/remotes/p4/project/MAIN:
  status      : dirty
  tip commit  : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
  old tree    : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
  cur tree    : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
  commit clock: 0
  last pack   : 


Marks
-----

-------------------
END OF CRASH REPORT

Now, being a perforce novice, I have no idea what this means and have no idea how to resolve this issue, or if its even possible. Has anyone run into a similar issue before? If so, how did you resolve it?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve finally figured out the solution to this problem. It turns out that a Perforce branch mapping was done in reverse and that was the source of this problem.

    Branch-foo was branched off of MAIN, which should have a branch mapping like so:

    //project/MAIN/... //project/Branch-foo/...

    However, the person who created the branch, reversed the mapping, thus resulting in this:

    //project/Branch-foo/... //project/MAIN/...

    This confused git-p4 as MAIN had the first changelists starting at #771 and Branch-foo had changelists starting at #7652, thus it couldn’t find any parent in Branch-foo and crashed. Changing the branch spec to the first one listed above fixed the probblem.

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