UKUUG: Source Control and Configuration Management using Perforce

Sunday, August 3rd, 2003

Looking for an alternative to CVS (because CVS has its quirks), I attended Tony’s talk on Source Control and Configuration Management using Perforce.

The problem, perforce aims to solve is: developers want to focus on developing, not reporting, but managers want to know what’s going on.

Some features of perforce:
- client/server architecture
- off-line development support is rudimentary
- self-repair and recovery features
- atomic transactions ensure data integrity
- clean workspace, no CVS files, . files
- you can rename file extensions, move directories without loosing version tracking
- each branch is placed in a different directory (e.g. main/, release_1/, release_2/)
- branch views track intention, for example by merging branch directories: dev/* -> my/*

The perforce company has about 60 employees and 2400 customers (e.g. HP). The perforce software is closed source, but a special license for OSS projects is available.

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