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.