Git repo scheduling issues

At work, the developer uses perforce to share code. I won't say "version control" because we are not allowed to check out the changes until they are ready for regression testing. In order to get my personal changesets under version control, I was given the right to build my own git and initialize the client depot view to force use as a git repository.

However, there are some difficulties with this.

• The client view lives in a subfolder ~
  
  , ( ~/p4
  
  ), and I want to have ~
  
  version control as well as its own separate history. I can't figure out how to keep the history for ~
  
  separate from ~/p4
  
  without using a submodule. The problem with the submodule is that it looks like I need to make a repository that becomes a submodule and then git submodule add <repo> <path>
  
  . But you don't need to make a repository of submodules, except ~
  
  . There seems to be no safe place to create an initial client depot view with a git p4 clone.

  (I worked out the assumption that initializing or cloning a repo into a subdirectory of a git repo is not supported. At least I can't find anything authoritative in the nested git repos.)

  edit: Just ignore ~/p4
  
  in the repo embedded in ~
  
  is enough for me to initialize the nested repo in ~/p4
  
  ? My __git_ps1 function still thinks that I am in a git repo when I visit an ignored subdirectory of a git repo, so I tend not to think.

• I need a "remote" repository created with git p4 sync as a branch in ~ / p4. We are required to keep all our code in ~ / p4 so that it is not supported. Can I checkout from a "remote" branch that is really a local branch?

• This is just for convenience, but I thought I might find out something by asking him. For 99% of the project, I just want to start by revisiting chapter p4 as an initialization object. For the other 1%, I would like to suck the entire history of p4 so that I can view it in git. IOW, after I finish initializing it, the initial commit of remotes / p 4 / master will contain:

  revision 1 of //depot/prod/Foo/Bar/*
  revision X of other files in //depot/prod/*, where X is the head revision
  
        
  
          
          
          
        
  
      

  and the branch remotes/p4/master
  
  contains Y commits, where Y is the number of changelists that the file had in //depot/prod/Foo/Bar/*
  
  , with each commit in history corresponding to one of those p4 changelists, and a HEAD similar to p4 head.

Edit: meagar's answer didn't quite work for me.

I got it working ~ and checked out multiple commits. I ignored ~ / p4 and ~ / p4 not in any commit object. =:

[~@ernie02] (master) $ git show HEAD:p4
fatal: Path 'p4' exists on disk, but not in 'HEAD'.

      

        
        
        
      

    

Then I went to ~ / p4 / prod, the branch I want to checkout. But this repo is broken:

[~/p4/prod@ernie02] (master) $ git log
(shows the log for the repo rooted at ~)
[~/p4/prod@ernie02] (master) $ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in ~/p4/prod/.git/
[~/p4/prod@ernie02] (master) $ git log
fatal: bad default revision 'HEAD'

      

        
        
        
      

    

Edit edit: Sorry, I forgot to transfer something ~/p4/prod

. I am trying to run git p4 sync // depot / prod now ...