Perforce and Subversion - a short story of a new-found love

Before my previous project I used CVS and SVN and obviously preferred SVN. In my eyes it wasn't maybe the best thing ever, but I was reasonably confident user, knew how to merge and, more importantly, I knew how to force it to cooperate when I screwed my local .svn folders. I liked it.

First few weeks after joining, working with Perforce was a major pain. Ideas of client specs, changelists, "opening for edit", creating branches etc. - all that was new, and not exactly friendly for ex-svn user. I simply didn't know how to use it. I complained a lot, I was completely confused (and rather complicated build process around it specific to the project didn't help at all).

However, recently I switched jobs, and after first shock of learning that we're still using CVS, I realized that the migration I'd love to see is not to SVN. It's to perforce.

What has changed? I have become much more comfortable with P4 and I realized that it really supports productivity and is more powerful than SVN. Bear in mind that last time I used SVN was not this recently and some of the things I'll mention here may be in SVN - but I don't think they were there when I was using it.

• The first great strength of P4, especially when working in a really big team and not much of code ownership (i.e. everybody touches everything) is merging. The fact that P4 can track exactly which changes were already integrated (merged) and which not makes it sooo easy to work on branch/trunk and only merge as and when necessary. And unless there are conflicts the merge task of quite big branch can be literally 2 mins. And - again - because P4 tracks what you already merged and what not, you could merge every day and barely notice you're working on a branch. you can bring changes between branch and trunk back and forth and unless you're (rather stupidly) trying to manually merge files - it's absolutely unbeatable. Of course working on branches will always give some overhead - but I feel that managing this with P4 is way easier than with SVN.


• I also loved 3-way diffs (and even though I'm sure that could be done on every version control system, somehow I first saw it when using P4).


• I loved changelists. I now can barely imagine living without them in SVN. Perhaps it's because I sometimes have some "side-work" that is of very low priority, but being able to keep it on a seperate changelist until I'm (finally) able to commit is really nice. I don't have to check with each commit what files I want to submit now and which ones later - or not at all. BTW latest P4 has idea of "shelving changes" so there isn't even a worry that if the machine dies, you lose your work.


• I absolutely love the fact that it doesn't store any additional information in my code folders and that it's so easy to revert if I accidentally remove a directory.


• Despite my initial reservations about "open for edit" sometimes it actually was really useful - for example before doing a major refactoring and deleting/renaming some classes I could check if by any chance someone else is working on them and talk to them, maybe postpone my refactoring a bit so that we don't have to merge. It's not a lock, multiple people can have a file open for edit - it's just a marker. The only drawback is that the first time you start editing a file Eclipse would hang for a fraction of second while opening the file for edit - but you can really live with that.


• Absolutely fantastic support for viewing history, with my favourite "time line view" which is basically "blame on steroids". You can see whole history (or selected range) of the file with deleted lines stroked out, additions and modifications clearly marked, with author names alongside, and easy access to details of the commit (when, comment etc.).

What I didn't like?

• That you need to remember to explicitly add files for add - in theory you have to do that in svn as well but somehow SVN clients are always much better in detecting new files. The solution here is to make Eclipse always open for Add when you create a file


• Eclipse plugin for P4 is nowhere near SVN plugin - but to be honest, it didn't take me very long to get used to having P4Win constantly open on second screen and I didn't miss direct Eclipse integration this much. It would have been much worse if I only had something like Tortoise.


• Creating of labels and branches could be easier. Once you grasp the concept and understand how it works - the procedure is not this bad, still I think it could be a bit more user-friendly (perhaps all it needs is a nicer wizard in P4Win!).


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Overall, I'd say that yes, perforce has a learning curve (in my case from "omg, wtf is that?!" to "it's actually kind of nice" it was about 2 months), but now given choice I'd go for Perforce without a second of hesitation. Unfortunately the fact that is not free (or perhaps should say: is very expensive) doesn't help - but I just found out that you can get Perforce for free for 2 devs - so you can always try it.

I hope that in near future I'll get a chance to try out Git which gets a lot of praise - however, I'm slightly worried by the lack of something in the class of P4Win/TortoiseSVN. Perhaps it's just a matter of time.