Ha! This post comes right at the time where I finally got around to open sourcing the patches I made to provide Perforce support which I use at my gamedev studio[0].
I find it kind of funny that perforce support was not included, only git support seems to exist in any meaningful way: despite the primary use of copybara being for releasing internal google code (which lives in Piper, a fork of Perforce).
I actually got a bit worried when looking at the git history before making the PR, because there's a lot of Gerrit Change-ID markers (meaning there's some gerrit code review system somewhere which I'm not privvy too) and I might have submitted a PR which never gets upstreamed..
I feel the same pang of pain from the lack of a perforce version of Gerrit/Rietveld.. but, you can't ask for everything!
[0]: https://github.com/google/copybara/pull/347
KLklodolph8小时前
Been using this for a while, mostly when I make a tool as part of a larger project and the tool is big enough to deserve its own release.
It’s powerful enough to do a whole bidirectional shipping operation where you export and import code—no thanks, that’s a hassle. I use it mostly for a simple fire and forget export, where I take a folder out of its original repo and preserve the history. Then I just move development to the new repo. The new project layout can be completely different, but Git blame works and I’m happy with that.
SCschrodinger11小时前
To those who have used it: is it handy for situations where you have multiple repos that want to share a little code, but it's not worth the trouble of extracting a library, referencing it, publishing versioned releases, updating dependent repos, etc?
And instead just "sync" a code folder from one main repo (perhaps containing common domain models) to other repos?
Basically the Go philosophy that a little bit of copying is better than a lot of dependency?
MAMarkSweep11小时前
Some other interesting tools in the space. Rust is using a tool called Josh to sync commits:
https://josh-project.dev
The blog post from the Rust people:
https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/06/04/how-josh-h...
Meta used to have an open source tool called fbshipit. But according to its open source repo they no longer use it:
https://github.com/facebookarchive/fbshipit
Any others in this space?
THtheodpHN5小时前
52+ years of progress... :-)
July, 2026: Google copybara allows one to move code between two prod repositories
March, 1974: IBM COPY allows one to move code between two prod partitioned data sets: OS/MVT and 0S/VS2 TSO Data Utilities COPY, FORMAT, LIST, MERGE User's Guide and Reference https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/downloads/8987
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Ha! This post comes right at the time where I finally got around to open sourcing the patches I made to provide Perforce support which I use at my gamedev studio[0]. I find it kind of funny that perforce support was not included, only git support seems to exist in any meaningful way: despite the primary use of copybara being for releasing internal google code (which lives in Piper, a fork of Perforce). I actually got a bit worried when looking at the git history before making the PR, because there's a lot of Gerrit Change-ID markers (meaning there's some gerrit code review system somewhere which I'm not privvy too) and I might have submitted a PR which never gets upstreamed.. I feel the same pang of pain from the lack of a perforce version of Gerrit/Rietveld.. but, you can't ask for everything! [0]: https://github.com/google/copybara/pull/347
Been using this for a while, mostly when I make a tool as part of a larger project and the tool is big enough to deserve its own release. It’s powerful enough to do a whole bidirectional shipping operation where you export and import code—no thanks, that’s a hassle. I use it mostly for a simple fire and forget export, where I take a folder out of its original repo and preserve the history. Then I just move development to the new repo. The new project layout can be completely different, but Git blame works and I’m happy with that.
To those who have used it: is it handy for situations where you have multiple repos that want to share a little code, but it's not worth the trouble of extracting a library, referencing it, publishing versioned releases, updating dependent repos, etc? And instead just "sync" a code folder from one main repo (perhaps containing common domain models) to other repos? Basically the Go philosophy that a little bit of copying is better than a lot of dependency?
Some other interesting tools in the space. Rust is using a tool called Josh to sync commits: https://josh-project.dev The blog post from the Rust people: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/06/04/how-josh-h... Meta used to have an open source tool called fbshipit. But according to its open source repo they no longer use it: https://github.com/facebookarchive/fbshipit Any others in this space?
52+ years of progress... :-) July, 2026: Google copybara allows one to move code between two prod repositories March, 1974: IBM COPY allows one to move code between two prod partitioned data sets: OS/MVT and 0S/VS2 TSO Data Utilities COPY, FORMAT, LIST, MERGE User's Guide and Reference https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/downloads/8987