Tracking a remotes/p4/master branch in git

Question

I'm cloning a repo that was first generated by git-p4. git-p4 uses a 'remotes/p4/master' branch that I would like to track. How do I tell git, which is cloning that repo, to track remotes/p4/master as well? That way I would be able to check out "origin/remotes/p4/master" or something.

Answer 1

You can adjust the fetching properties to mirror those references as well, although not as part of a standard clone.

So a sequence like:

git clone ~/p4/git/services/info-service.git
cd info-service
git config --add remote.origin.fetch +refs/remotes/p4/*:refs/remotes/origin/p4/*
git fetch origin

This will fetch refs/remotes/p4/release/1.1 for example in info-service.git to be refs/remotes/origin/p4/release/1.1 in your clone, and you could create a branch based on it with git checkout -b r1.1-fixes origin/p4/release/1.1

Having said all that, in my Perforce replica repos, I create actual branches to mirror all the p4 remote branches, largely to avoid having to go through all the above. It also gives me a chance to fix up the naming from p4 path prefixes to git branch names (so p4/main becomes master, p4/release/1.1 becomes r1.1 etc). I use my own p4-to-git replication, but you could do much the same by looping over the p4 remote refs with git for-each-ref and setting local branches using git update-ref.