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The VSSToP4 Project

Visual SourceSafe to Perforce Migration



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Content Source and documentation for Perforce's VssToP4 scripts - Perl scripts to migrate a repository from Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe into Perforce.

This set of Perl scripts converts VSS archives to Perforce, preserving the original times and authors. Branches are translated verbatim, individual file revisions are grouped as much as possible into Perforce's notion of atomic changes.

Requires Perl 5.6, VSS 5.0 or 6.0 (not 2005 for now) and Perforce 97.3 or later. The scripts only run on Windows (read values from Registry).

Basic Files required to download are (see readme for more info):

  • ActiveState Perl (5.6 is recommended - have had problems with 5.8)

  • vsstop4.zip (source files for conversion)

  • P4Perl for Perl 5.6.6 or P4Perl for Perl 5.8 (required interface to P4 from Perl) - please do not use newer versions of P4Perl since they probably won't work. This page will be updated if later versions are valid. Install P4Perl after Perl is installed.

Please note that there is now a special version which handles files with previous illegal characters (#, *, %, @). This version is known to work but there hasn't yet been time to fully fold all changes into the main version (e.g. to switch this handling on or off etc). Thus the special version requires a 2005.2 server, and does things like "p4 add -f" If you want this special version:

These scripts are not fully supported - but feel free to contact Curator below.

There are a couple of utilities available at: http://public.perforce.com/guest/robert_cowham/perforce/utils/index.html which will help with reporting on branched and deleted files in VSS, also files with illegal filenames for Perforce (e.g. containing '#' or '@' - although these are no longer illegal with version 2004.2 of the server but do require escaping).
Curator Robert Cowham. Please email if you have submitted contributions you'd like published, or if you have ideas for enhancement.

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