Re: CVS vs. Perforce
On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 10:29:48PM -0400, Charles Soper wrote: [CVS vs. Perforce] There was a long thread on this topic recently. Check the list archives. -- | | /\ |-_|/ Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.[EMAIL PROTECTED] | | / Outlook not so good. That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next. - Anonymous ___ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs
CVS vs. Perforce
Hello, I was hoping to get some opinions from people on this list. Currently, I'm looking into getting a new version control system. I have 23 users on Windows and Macintosh and a few users are on Linux. Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 5.0 has almost become unusable for us. It becomes corrupted almost once every week or two! Because we need a Macintosh CodeWarrior IDE plug-in I think that CVS and Perforce are really the only ones for me to look at. The Windows clients need a Visual C++ 6.0 plug-in. It would be great to have stand-along GUIs on both. Right now I'm leaning a little bit towards Perforce. Perforce has a number of features that CVS doesn't seem to have. I might be wrong. Some of these features include atomic check-ins (related changes are checked in as a single atomic transaction), change lists (checkouts/checkins are grouped and can be tracked), better branching and merging (so I've been told), and official tech support. I have also heard a lot of good things about CVS. Also, several people that I have talked with have recommended the Subversion Project (http://subversion.tigris.org/). A big difference between CVS and Perforce is cost. CVS is free and Perforce will cost more $12,000 to license. Does anyone have opinions to share regarding this decision? Some Perforce users have told me that it's worth the money, but I really don't know how much experience they have with CVS. Thanks for any help, Chuck ___ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs
RE: cvs vs. perforce
My 2 bits worth. I have first hand experience with both systems and I definately prefer Perforce. I'm currently SCM person for a shop using CVS, and I constantly miss the speed and ease with which Perforce is able to return metadata information (without having to have a CVS information directory structure setup in one's working area). The typical developer may not need to use these kind of reporting features as often as an SCM person, but even their daily edit/submit use is faster than cvs can offer (especially when checking out numerable files). I'm not sure, but I think it's greater speed is due to the fact that the history files themselves contain only the 'main trunk' (a new directory structure is created for branching) and all metadata is stored in a database structure instead of in the history files themselves. Perforce's branching/merging is superior as it has knowledge of when the last integration from one branch to another was performed and the next integration performed will proceed from that point. I've attempted to implement a wrapper script in cvs that tracks such information using tags, but it has never quite come together. Perforce has easy permissions handling so that the administrator can grant certain users write access to various areas and read to others. Yes, you can do this in cvs, but it's not nearly as intuitive. Both systems have their security holes and workarounds. I find most everything about Perforce intuitive and when my previous employer made the switch from RCS to Perforce, there was not a single developer out of about 30 that weren't exceptionally pleased with the ease of use and speed increase. The transition was relatively simple. I also prefer the atomic commits it offers. It's change number system is simple and, once your tools are converted to using this information (over checking out with tags), you'll appreciate this. Additionally, Perforce's support is exceptional. We always had responses to any question within a day and it was always by a technical person who understood the system perfectly. The rare time we did come across a bug, we were quickly supplied with a workaround and the fix would be in their next patch. All in all, I was very impressed with Perforce and it's my opinion that if your company's willing to pay for a revision control system initially, Perforce will easily pay for itself in the long run. At home, I use Perforce's unlicensed two-user two-client system to control my personal scripts, web page development, etc. -Lauree -Original Message- From: Bill Northlich [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, March 29, 2002 12:05 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: cvs vs. perforce Anyone care to offer reasons, other than free, to use cvs over perforce? Or, the other way around? We are trying to make a decision. Thanks, /b ___ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs ___ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs
cvs vs. perforce
Anyone care to offer reasons, other than free, to use cvs over perforce? Or, the other way around? We are trying to make a decision. Thanks, /b ___ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs
Re: cvs vs. perforce
[ On Friday, March 29, 2002 at 20:05:06 (GMT), Bill Northlich wrote: ] Subject: cvs vs. perforce Anyone care to offer reasons, other than free, to use cvs over perforce? Or, the other way around? We are trying to make a decision. Thanks, You might want to look at Aegis and Vesta as well (Vesta was recently released as open source!) -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Planix, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED]; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs
Re: cvs vs. perforce
On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 08:05:06PM +, Bill Northlich wrote: Anyone care to offer reasons, other than free, to use cvs over perforce? Or, the other way around? We are trying to make a decision. The below is based on a theoretical analysis of Perforce and talking to a number of people that use it. This is because I'm working on my own version control system, and have not wanted to get tied up in any sort of license problem with Perforce. Things CVS are better at than Perforce: - Freer license (at least for most purposes) - Easy source availability - Allows mirroring of repositories, so people can work offline easily - Branches with large amounts of small changes (touching many files with small changes) will consume more diskspace under p4 than CVS, due to the - cvs annotate - no similar feature exists in p4 - Better known to open source developers, so you get that kind of support easier Things Perforce are better at than CVS: - Maintaining metadata. Perforce handles more kinds of metadata than CVS; for instance, a commit is a single unit, and is not spread across different files. I also believes it actually handles directories, instead of regarding them as a sort of nuisance and delegating them to second class citizen status. - Speed. Should be much faster. - Ability to do evaluations for all your workspaces, because the metadata is stored on the server - Better branch handling - branches are cheap to create, fast to use, and p4 maintain merge metadata for them, so keeping branches in sync is easier. - Support for rename. All in all, my personal impression is that Perforce is a much better version control system than CVS unless you need the (few) features CVS are better at. Annotate and replication are the most important ones; diskspace is cheap, and in most cases, you'll have enough pain with CVS that you do not want to fix it. Some of the branch issues in CVS can be worked around with careful use of tags (and if you are willing to write code, http://people.freebsd.org/~eivind/CVSFile-0.2.tar.gz can be used to work around more of it), but both of these approaches make replication quite a bit more expensive, which is likely to be a problem if you have a large repository. Eivind. ___ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs
Re: [info-cvs] Re: cvs vs. perforce
On Fri, 29 Mar 2002, Eivind Eklund wrote: Things Perforce are better at than CVS: - Maintaining metadata. Perforce handles more kinds of metadata than CVS; for instance, a commit is a single unit, and is not spread across different files. The information is all there, just not organized for easy retrieval. Karl Fogel's cvs2cl.pl program shoes that it's possible to parse the output of cvs log and match together the revisions that make up each commit. Arguably, reconstructing the information this way is much slower. But on the other hand, this is historic information that does not change. Once you have retrieved the information, you can retain it somewhere in a more convenient form. I also believes it actually handles directories, instead of regarding them as a sort of nuisance and delegating them to second class citizen status. But of course this can be done with a small layer of software over CVS. -- Meta-CVS: solid version control tool with directory structure versioning. http://users.footprints.net/~kaz/mcvs.html ___ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs
