Subject: Re: From P4 to Git

From: Sam Vilain <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:29:48 +1200

Alex Riesen wrote:
>> The "live" parts are never touched - only the write-only files that
>> perforce writes; and the rcs files are read using rcs.
>>     
>
> I always felt Perforce had a touch of pure evil...
>   

Perforce is not really that evil imho. It uses rcs for what it's good at
- storing file revisions. All the metadata it kept in table stores which
could be checkpointed and journalled like a regular database. Simple,
elegant, fast, robust. Overall I'd say it was a well engineered piece of
software which delivered great benefits to its users, far less evil than
CVS or Subversion. Which is funny because Subversion rips off many
concepts from Perforce including the 'branching is just copying' idea.
But they left behind the integration system. Even now svn's merging
support can't even handle merging correctly in the face of branched
branches, or so I hear. That's evil - pretending to have a feature
solved when they haven't even met the standard set by bzr, hg, mtn, git,
etc.

Sam