On Jan 27, 2011, at 12:45 PM, Neil Brewitt wrote:
Nicholas,
Anyone who hates perforce is a victim of bad education or software religion.
I can't agree here. I'm a long-time user of Perforce as well and evangelized it
over other solutions when it was still so clearly better. However, some of its
processes have become a bit long-in-the-tooth when compared to other systems.
It's faster, it's safer, it's lighter. It just works.
It is fast. It is safe. It's not so light in that it pretty much requires a
server connection. It does work if you stick to its rules.
I've been using Git a lot lately for another project and while I'm obligated to
mention the horrific learning curve (which exists with Perforce as well) and
insane lack of safeguards (keeps mum when rebasing a branch that's already been
pushed), it excels in a few areas:
- local, incremental commits; even Perforce's shelves don't address this, do
they?
- branching is a helluva lot lighter and easier than in P4
- offline work is just a pain in the ass (and the new local offline server was
at best a kludge when last I checked)
That said, P4's GUI tools far exceed those of Git. I'm not going to go into a
full comparison, but Perforce is not without its weaknesses.
Reverts too difficult for you? Then don't revert changes. Use the software how
it's meant to be used. In a live perforce install for twenty developers I saw
fewer than three reverts in three years. Guess what, these were not legendary
perfect developers. They just used p4 sensibly and as intended.
Once you find a workflow that works, any decent system will feel like this
after a while. My team is at the same place with Git now -- we haven't had any
WTF moments in months, whereas at the beginning, they came daily -- but that
doesn't mean Git is without its flaws.
Marco
--
Marco Von Ballmoos
http://earthli.com - Home of the earthli WebCore; PHP web sites made simple.
