On Mar 4, 2006, at 10:32 AM, Robert Watson wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Mar 2006 pfgshield-freebsd@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> I wanted to avoid turning this thread into a discussion of the
>> different VCSs but perhaps that might be healthy. Many people like
>> perforce... I wonder if the developer community would be happy to
>> accept a "commercial" solution.
>
> [...Perforce met a critical need for branched development, and
> Subversion could not import the repo at the time...]
And, as I recall, at the time, subversion's ability to manage
branches in a lightweight fashion was just not there.
How is it now? If it still cannot compare to Perforce, then it's
likely a non-starter.
My employer has a fairly large Perforce installation going, and
every now and again, someone rolls out the open source replacement
bikeshed, but it runs right into the "can it handle our branched
development model?" brick wall and stops, dead.
Perforce's *huge* weakness is the way it handles its metadata (it
wants to keep some of its databases entirely in RAM, and they get
HUGE). This prevents distributing the repo, and it prevents granting
public, anonymous access to the p4 side of the world for freebsd.org
(cripes, you'd need an E15K or an Altix cluster to have enough RAM
and backing store for that!), but nothing else I've seen can do
branching and merging the way Perforce can.
--
Chris BeHanna
chris@behanna.org