Having seen amazing videos of gource I wanted to vizualize the changelog of the codebase I work on. The only trouble was that gource does not understand perforce change log format directly. Fortunately, gource can read text files where each line is a change to one file in the format "timestamp|author|filename|action|colour".
Perforce logs produced by `p4 describe -s` command have the following format:
Perforce logs produced by `p4 describe -s` command have the following format:
Change 106 by max@max_perforce on 2008/10/20 16:17:31 mt makefiles Affected files ... ... //depot/infra/main/src/infra/Makefile#3 edit ... //depot/infra/main/src/infra/Makefile.mt#3 delete
Which should be converted for gource to:
1224515851|max|M|//depot/infra/main/src/infra/Makefile| 1224515851|max|D|//depot/infra/main/src/infra/Makefile.mt|
It is a two-stage process to convert perforce logs to gource logs. The first stage is to extract perforce logs into a file, because it takes a while and you may like to make several passes over it. It can be done with a couple of lines of bash:
$ p4_head=$(p4 changes -m 1 | { read -a words && echo ${words[1]}; })
$ { for((i = 0; ++i <= p4_head;)); do p4 describe -s $i; done } > p4.log
The second stage is to filter and convert perforce changelog into gsource log. Here is how to convert changes only in //depot/infra/main with the python script I wrote:
$ ./p4-gource.py -p //depot/infra/main -o main.gource p4.log
Now gource can be used to vizualize the changelog:
$ gource --highlight-all-users main.gource
