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RE: SVN / PERFORCE comparison

From: Janulewicz, Matthew <MJanulewicz_at_westernasset.com>
Date: 2005-06-28 18:05:35 CEST

I admined Perforce for a few years and really loved it, and am just a
casual Subversion experimenter. So, at the risk of alienating (more)
people on the list, I'll give a few points (not already mentioned) that
are also nice about Perforce.

* Okay, already mentioned, but SPEED. It's uber fast in everything it
does.
* 'Real' tags, if that's your thing.
* Easier to hook into bug tracking with 'jobs' mechanism.
* GUI support, cross platform (unified looking/acting, QT based, Windows
and *nix look identical.)
* World class support.
* Better/more granular permissions mechanism.
* Good training/consultant network.
* Many many plugins for many many IDE's etc.

The 5th item up there might be important if you are not at a company
that already embraces open source and isn't used to the support model.
The authors and contributors to Subversion frequent this list and it's
good, but they don't have all the time a paid support professional will
have for you, and Perforce blows away any support group I've ever had to
deal with. Problems are rare (but it is a Berkeley DB) but they do crop
up, and it's nice to be helped by someone that knows what they're
talking about in 10 minutes, instead of waiting for a list response.
(Note that Perforce has a very active mailing list, too.)

However, Subversion is certainly good enough for professional use, and
the cost is a compelling argument. As with most open source products,
there is some admin overhead, compiling overhead, Apache setup overhead,
etc., but overall I think it could be worth it if it's implemented in a
sane way. I don't see the long term admin effort being any more than
Perforce and the branching/merging seems about as easy to comprehend.

[As an aside, my current (new) company uses CVS and will eventually be
open to running Subversion, if I have anything to say about it (and I
do.) The culture here supports it so it's almost a no-brainer.]

-Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: Romain Prevost [mailto:Romain.Prevost@gltrade.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2005 6:42 AM
To: users@subversion.tigris.org
Subject: RE: SVN / PERFORCE comparison

The propagation of changes to a repository to another may be an
interesting feature
for shared components between projects. Sounds interesting. I'll have a
demo from
a Perforce guy by Friday, I'll check this out.

Disconnected operations may be interesting too, since we have a lot of
developers
abroad. We have some guys already using P4. They have people abroad too,
and their
solution, since the bandwith is very limited, is a proxy server, so the
first guy updating make the changes faster for everyone else.

Definitely, Subversion seems more convenient for distributed operations.
I will
start to run some tests in order to compare speed between P4 and SVN.
I'll post them
here, if they are relevant.

If you have more for SVN, come on :)

Cagatay Catal [cagatay.catal@bte.mam.gov.tr]:

SVN/PERFORCE
* Does the system support moving a file or directory to a different
location while still retaining the history of the file?
        SVN: Yes. Renames are supported
        Perforce: Not directly (you copy and then delete but it manages
to keep track of the branch; the item below allows for this very
feature)
*Can the system propagate changes from one repository to another?
        SVN: Yes, using either Chia-Ling Kao's SVN::Mirror script or the
svn- push utility by Shlomi Fish.
        Perforce: Unknown. Probably Not.

Scott Lawrence [slawrence@pingtel.com] :

Subversion is much better for disconnected operation, because working
copy state is stored in the working copy rather than on the server.
Operations as common as 'diff against what I checked out' or 'revert my
changes' can be done locally on the working copy without talking to the
server.

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Received on Tue Jun 28 18:09:28 2005

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