I had Perforce running on my server when it was a Windows machine. I like Perforce, but I’m liking Git even more right now. I can’t just ditch Perforce, though, my project histories are in there and I’d rather not throw that away.
Before shutting Windows down for good, I carefully followed steps 1-9 outlined in this article. Step 10 is a very important one, read the linked document carefully to understand the case-related problems. I found it surprising that Windows Perforce servers only uses lowercase names in the revision archives. This makes p4migrate necessary and important. Honestly, I can’t break down the process any better than Perforce, just follow the steps and you’ll be fine.
After letting p4migrate produce a new, modified checkpoint and letting it rename my version archives, I did the line-ending conversion in step 11. Then, I was able to run the restore process and fire up the server.
I should also mention that I made sure to download the same version of the Linux Perforce server as was previously running on Windows.
I also want to mention that I still like Perforce; I’m switching because I think Git will suit me better. Perforce Software is a top-notch company with fantastic support and a great product. I’ve been using their free 2-user server for almost 6 years and I expect I will continue using it at my day job (where we have a fully-licensed server) for the foreseeable future.
