Is there a way to swap files, and preserve history in perforce, in one step?

Question

I have some files, like upgrade01.x and upgrade02.x, where the name defines some order. Due to external constraints, I must use this naming convention but I want so swap them, 01 become 02 and 02 become 01. I tried renaming update01.x to a temp name (without submitting it), then tried change update02.x to be update01.x but perforce doesn't let me do that.

I can submit the rename to something temporary, then rename one to the other, then the rename the temp, but is a monster pain. Also, the history looks really weird (but that might be unavoidable).

Is there a way to do this in one sane operation?

Answer 1

Doing the rename in two steps (rename both to intermediate names, then each back into the place of the other) might be the preferred option if you want the "identity" of each file to follow it to the new name (e.g. when you merge from other branches, you want merges to be remapped according to the new name rather than going to the old one).

If your priority is to have this happen in a single changelist, though, and you're not so concerned about whether the history preserves the notion of which file is which, I'd do it like this:

p4 copy upgrade01.x upgrade02.x
p4 copy upgrade02.x upgrade01.x
p4 submit

This will get you a nice neat little X in the revision graph (which I suspect is what you want), but not a true rename.

Merging to/from other branches will be a little tricky either way; if you go the true rename option, when you merge the rename to other branches you'll need to go change by change to repeat the process of renaming to something intermediate and then back (since the target branch will have the same constraint of not being able to rename onto something that is itself already open for rename). If you go the copy option, you'll need to manually specify which file to merge into which depending on what state each branch is in and whether there are outstanding changes requiring an actual merge.