GIT vs Perforce- Two VCS will enter one will leave

Question

So I m in the process of getting GIT sold at work  First thing I need is to convince everyone that GIT is better at what they re already used to doing  We currently use Perforce  Anybody else go through a similar sale  Any good links advice   One of the big wins is that we can work with it disconnected from the network  Another win IMO is the way adds checkouts are handled  More points are welcome  Also we have about 10-20 devs total

User · Answer

I have been using Perforce for a long time and recently I also started to use GIT. Here is my "objective" opinion:

Perforce features:

GUI tools seem to be more feature rich (e.g. Time lapse view, Revision graph)
Speed when syncing to head revision (no overhead of transferring whole history)
Eclipse/Visual Studio Integration is really nice
You can develop multiple features in one branch per Changelist (I am still not 100% sure if this is an advantage over GIT)
You can "spy" what other developers are doing - what kind of files they have checked out.

GIT features:

I got impressions that GIT command line is much simpler than Perforce (init/clone, add, commit. No configuration of complex Workspaces)
Speed when accessing project history after a checkout (comes at a cost of copying whole history when syncing)
Offline mode (developers will not complain that unreachable P4 server will prohibit them from coding)
Creating a new branches is much faster
The "main" GIT server does not need plenty of TBytes of storage, because each developer can have it's own local sandbox
GIT is OpenSource - no Licensing fees
If your Company is contributing also to OpenSource projects then sharing patches is way much easier with GIT

Overall for OpenSource/Distributed projects I would always recommend GIT, because it is more like a P2P application and everyone can participate in development. For example, I remember that when I was doing remote development with Perforce I was syncing 4GB Projects over 1Mbps link once in a week. Alot of time was simply wasted because of that. Also we needed set up VPN to do that.

If you have a small company and P4 server will be always up then I would say that Perforce is also a very good option.

User · Answer

I have no experience with Git  but I have with Mercurial which is also a distributed VCS  It depends on the project really  but in our case a distributed VCS suited the project as basically eliminated frequent broken builds   I think it depends on the project really  as some are better suited towards a client-server VCS  and others towads a distributed one

User · Answer

I think in terms of keeping people happy during  post switch over  one of things to get across early is just how private a local branch can be in Git  and how much freedom that gives them to make mistakes  Get them all to clone themselves a few private branches from the current code and then go wild in there  experimenting  Rename some files  check stuff in  merge things from another branch  rewind history  rebase one set of changes on top of another  and so on  Show how even their worst accidents locally have no consequences for their colleagues  What you want is a situation where developers feel safe  so they can learn faster  since Git has a steep learning curve that s important  and then eventually so that they re more effective as developers   When you re trying to learn a centralised tool  obviously you will be worried about making some goof that causes problems for other users of the repository  The fear of embarrassment alone is enough to discourage people from experimenting   Even having a special  training  repository doesn t help  because inevitably developers will encounter a situation in the production system that they never saw during training  and so they re back to worrying   But Git s distributed nature does away with this  You can try any experiment in a local branch  and if it goes horribly wrong  just throw the branch away and nobody needs to know  Since you can create a local branch of anything  you can replicate a problem you re seeing with the real live repository  yet have no danger of  breaking the build  or otherwise making a fool of yourself  You can check absolutely everything in  as soon as you ve done it  no trying to batch work up into neat little packages  So not just the two major code changes you spent four hours on today  but also that build fix that you remembered half way through  and the spelling mistake in the documentation you spotted while explaining something to a colleague  and so on  And if the major changes are abandoned because the project is changing direction  you can cherry pick the build fix and the spelling mistake out of your branch and keep those with no hassle

User · Answer

The command that sold me on git personally was bisect  I don t think that this feature is available in any other version control system as of now    That being said  if people are used to a GUI client for source control they are not going to be impressed with git  Right now the only full-featured client is command-line

User · Answer

The command that sold me on git personally was bisect  I don t think that this feature is available in any other version control system as of now    That being said  if people are used to a GUI client for source control they are not going to be impressed with git  Right now the only full-featured client is command-line

User · Answer

Using GIT as substitute for bad code line management is common  Many of the disadvantages of Perforce are a result of bad branching strategies  The same for any other centralized tool  If you have to create a ton of branches you are doing something wrong  Why do developers need to create so many branches   Also  why is working disconnected so important anyway  Just so someone can work on a train  That s about the only place these days you can t get a wireless connection  And even most trains have decent WiFi

User · Answer

Apparently GitHub now offer git training courses to companies  Quoth their blog post about it      I   ve been down to the Google campus a number of times in the last few weeks helping to train the Androids there in Git   I was asked by Shawn Pearce  you may know him from his Git and EGit JGit glory     he is the hero that takes over maintanance when Junio is out of town  to come in to help him train the Google engineers working on Andriod in transitioning from Perforce to Git  so Android could be shared with the masses   I can tell you I was more than happy to do it                  Logical Awesome is now officially offering this type of custom training service to all companies  where we can help your organization with training and planning if you are thinking about switching to Git as well    Emphasis mine

User · Answer

Here s what I don t like about git   First of all  I think the distributed idea flies in the face of reality  Everybody who s actually using git is doing so in a centralised way  even Linus Torvalds  If the kernel was managed in a distributed way  that would mean I couldn t actually download the  official  kernel sources - there wouldn t be one - I d have to decide whether I want Linus  version  or Joe s version  or Bill s version  That would obviously be ridiculous  and that s why there is an official definition which Linus controls using a centralised workflow   If you accept that you want a centralised definition of your stuff  then it becomes clear that the server and client roles are completely different  so the dogma that the client and server softwares should be the same becomes purely limiting  The dogma that the client and server data should be the same becomes patently ridiculous  especially in a codebase that s got fifteen years of history that nobody cares about but everybody would have to clone   What we actually want to do with all that old stuff is bung it in a cupboard and forget that it s there  just like any normal VCS does  The fact that git hauls it all back and forth over the network every day is very dangerous  because it nags you to prune it  That pruning involves a lot of tedious decisions and it can go wrong  So people will probably keep a whole series of snapshot repos from various points in history  but wasn t that what source control was for in the first place  This problem didn t exist until somebody invented the distributed model   Git actively encourages people to rewrite history  and the above is probably one reason for that  Every normal VCS makes rewriting history impossible for all but the admins  and makes sure the admins have no reason to consider it  Correct me if I m wrong  but as far as I know  git provides no way to grant normal users write access but ban them from rewriting history  That means any developer with a grudge  or who was still struggling with the learning curve  could trash the whole codebase  How do we tighten that one  Well  either you make regular backups of the entire history  i e  you keep history squared  or you ban write access to all except some poor sod who would receive all the diffs by email and merge them by hand   Let s take an example of a well-funded  large project and see how git is working for them  Android  I once decided to have a play with the android system itself  I found out that I was supposed to use a bunch of scripts called repo to get at their git  Some of repo runs on the client and some on the server  but both  by their very existence  are illustrating the fact that git is incomplete in either capacity  What happened is that I was unable to pull the sources for about a week and then gave up altogether  I would have had to pull a truly vast amount of data from several different repositories  but the server was completely overloaded with people like me  Repo was timing out and was unable to resume from where it had timed out  If git is so distributable  you d have thought that they d have done some kind of peer-to-peer thing to relieve the load on that one server  Git is distributable  but it s not a server  Git repo is a server  but repo is not distributable cos it s just an ad-hoc collection of hacks   A similar illustration of git s inadequacy is gitolite  and its ancestor which apparently didn t work out so well   Gitolite describes its job as easing the deployment of a git server  Again  the very existence of this thing proves that git is not a server  any more than it is a client  What s more  it never will be  because if it grew into either it would be betraying it s founding principles    Even if you did believe in the distributed thing  git would still be a mess  What  for instance  is a branch  They say that you implicitly make a branch every time you clone a repository  but that can t be the same thing as a branch in a single repository  So that s at least two different things being referred to as branches  But then  you can also rewind in a repo and just start editing  Is that like the second type of branch  or something different again  Maybe it depends what type of repo you ve got - oh yes - apparently the repo is not a very clear concept either  There are normal ones and bare ones  You can t push to a normal one because the bare part might get out of sync with its source tree  But you can t cvsimport to a bare one cos they didn t think of that  So you have to cvsimport to a normal one  clone that to a bare one which developers hit  and cvsexport that to a cvs working copy which still has to be checked into cvs  Who can be bothered  Where did all these complications come from  From the distributed idea itself  I ditched gitolite in the end because it was imposing even more of these restrictions on me   Git says that branching should be light  but many companies already have a serious rogue branch problem so I d have thought that branching should be a momentous decision with strict policing  This is where perforce really shines     In perforce you rarely need branches because you can juggle changesets in a very agile way  For instance  the usual workflow is that you sync to the last known good version on mainline  then write your feature  Whenever you attempt to modify a file  the diff of that file gets added to your  default changeset   When you attempt to check in the changeset  it automatically tries to merge the news from mainline into your changeset  effectively rebasing it  and then commits  This workflow is enforced without you even needing to understand it  Mainline thus collects a history of changes which you can quite easily cherry pick your way through later  For instance  suppose you want to revert an old one  say  the one before the one before last  You sync to the moment before the offending change  mark the affected files as part of the changeset  sync to the moment after and merge with  always mine    There was something very interesting there  syncing doesn t mean having the same thing - if a file is editable  i e  in an active changeset  it won t be clobbered by the sync but marked as due for resolving    Now you have a changelist that undoes the offending one  Merge in the subsequent news and you have a changelist that you can plop on top of mainline to have the desired effect  At no point did we rewrite any history   Now  supposing half way through this process  somebody runs up to you and tells you to drop everything and fix some bug  You just give your default changelist a name  a number actually  then  suspend  it  fix the bug in the now empty default changelist  commit it  and resume the named changelist  It s typical to have several changelists suspended at a time where you try different things out  It s easy and private  You get what you really want from a branch regime without the temptation to procrastinate or chicken out of merging to mainline   I suppose it would be theoretically possible to do something similar in git  but git makes practically anything possible rather than asserting a workflow we approve of  The centralised model is a bunch of valid simplifications relative to the distributed model which is an invalid generalisation  It s so overgeneralised that it basically expects you to implement source control on top of it  as repo does   The other thing is replication  In git  anything is possible so you have to figure it out for yourself  In perforce  you get an effectively stateless cache  The only configuration it needs to know is where the master is  and the clients can point at either the master or the cache at their discretion  That s a five minute job and it can t go wrong   You ve also got triggers and customisable forms for asserting code reviews  bugzilla references etc  and of course  you have branches for when you actually need them  It s not clearcase  but it s close  and it s dead easy to set up and maintain   All in all  I think that if you know you re going to work in a centralised way  which everybody does  you might as well use a tool that was designed with that in mind  Git is overrated because of Linus  fearsome wit together with peoples  tendency to follow each other around like sheep  but its main raison d etre doesn t actually stand up to common sense  and by following it  git ties its own hands with the two huge dogmas that  a  the software and  b  the data have to be the same at both client and server  and that will always make it complicated and lame at the centralised job

User · Answer

I think in terms of keeping people happy during  post switch over  one of things to get across early is just how private a local branch can be in Git  and how much freedom that gives them to make mistakes  Get them all to clone themselves a few private branches from the current code and then go wild in there  experimenting  Rename some files  check stuff in  merge things from another branch  rewind history  rebase one set of changes on top of another  and so on  Show how even their worst accidents locally have no consequences for their colleagues  What you want is a situation where developers feel safe  so they can learn faster  since Git has a steep learning curve that s important  and then eventually so that they re more effective as developers   When you re trying to learn a centralised tool  obviously you will be worried about making some goof that causes problems for other users of the repository  The fear of embarrassment alone is enough to discourage people from experimenting   Even having a special  training  repository doesn t help  because inevitably developers will encounter a situation in the production system that they never saw during training  and so they re back to worrying   But Git s distributed nature does away with this  You can try any experiment in a local branch  and if it goes horribly wrong  just throw the branch away and nobody needs to know  Since you can create a local branch of anything  you can replicate a problem you re seeing with the real live repository  yet have no danger of  breaking the build  or otherwise making a fool of yourself  You can check absolutely everything in  as soon as you ve done it  no trying to batch work up into neat little packages  So not just the two major code changes you spent four hours on today  but also that build fix that you remembered half way through  and the spelling mistake in the documentation you spotted while explaining something to a colleague  and so on  And if the major changes are abandoned because the project is changing direction  you can cherry pick the build fix and the spelling mistake out of your branch and keep those with no hassle

User · Answer

It would take me a lot of convincing to switch from perforce   In the two companies I used it it was more than adequate   Those were both companies with disparate offices  but the offices were set up with plenty of infrastructure so there was no need to have the disjoint disconnected features     How many developers are you talking about changing over   The real question is - what is it about perforce that is not meeting your organization s needs that git can provide   And similarly  what weaknesses does git have compared to perforce   If you can t answer that yourself then asking here won t help   You need to find a business case for your company    e g  Perhaps it is with lower overall cost of ownership  that includes loss of productivity for the interim learning stage  higher admin costs  at least initially   etc    I think you are in for a tough sell - perforce is a pretty good one to try to replace   It is a no brainer if you are trying to boot out pvcs or ssafe

User · Answer

I think the one thing that I know GIT wins on is it s ability to  preserve line endings  on all files  whereas perforce seems to insist on translating them into either Unix  Dos Windows or MacOS9 format    n     r n  or   r    This is a real pain if you re writing Unix scripts in a Windows environment  or a mixed OS environment  It s not even possible to set the rule on a per-file-extension basis  For instance  it would convert  sh   bash   unix files to Unix format  and convert  ccp   bat or  com files to Dos Windows format   In GIT  I m not sure if that s default  an option or the only option  you can set it up to  preserve line endings   That means  you can manually change the line endings of a file  and then GIT will leave that format the way it is  This seems to me like the ideal way to do things  and I don t understand why this isn t an option with Perforce   The only way you can achieve this behavior  is to mark the files as binary  As I see that  that would be a nasty hack to workaround a missing feature  Apart from being tedious to have to do on all scripts  etc  it would also probably break most diffs  etc   The  solution  that we ve settled for at the moment  is to run a sed command to remove all carriage returns from the scripts every time they re deployed to their Unix environment  This isn t ideal either  especially since some of them are deployed inside WAR files  and the sed line has to be run again when they re unpacked   This is just something I think gives GIT a great advantage  and which I don t think has been mentioned above   EDIT  After having been using Perforce for a bit longer  I d like to add another couple of comments   A  Something I really miss in Perforce is a clear and instance diff  including changed  removed and added files  This is available in GIT with the git diff command  but in Perforce  files have to be checked out before their changes are recorded  and while you might have your main editors  like Eclipse  set up to automatically check files out when you edit them  you might sometimes edit files in other ways  notepad  unix commands  etc   And new files don t seem to be added automatically at all  even using Eclipse and p4eclipse  which can be rather annoying  So to find all changes  you have to run a  Diff against     on the entire workspace  which first of all takes a while to run  and secondly includes all kind of irrelevant things unless you set up very complicated exclusion lists  which leads me to the next point   B  In GIT I find the  gitignore very simple and easy to manage  read and understand  However  the workspace ignore exclude lists configurable in Perforce seem unwieldy and unnecessarily complex  I haven t been able to get any exclusions with wildcards working  I would like to do something like  -  Server mainline     target         Svend Hansen Server     target       To exclude all target folders within all projects inside Server mainline  However  this doesn t seem to work like I would have expected  and I ve ended up adding a line for every project like   -  Server mainline projectA target        Svend Hansen Server projectA target     -  Server mainline projectB target        Svend Hansen Server projectB target           And similar lines for bin folders   classpath and  projet files and more   C  In Perforce there are the rather useful changelists  However  assume I make a group of changes  check them all and put them in a changelist  to then work on something else before submitting that changelist  If I later make a change to one of the files included in the first changelist  that file will still be in that changelist  and I can t just later submit the changelist assuming that it only contains the changes that I originally added  though it will be the same files   In GIT  if you add a file and them make further changes to it  those changes will not have been added  and would still show in a git diff and you wouldn t be able to commit the file without first adding the new changes as well  Of course  this isn t usefull in the same way the changelist can be as you only have one set of added files  but in GIT you can just commit the changes  as that doesn t actually push them  You could them work on other changes before pushing them  but you wouldn t be able to push anything else that you add later  without pushing the former changes as well

User · Answer

It would take me a lot of convincing to switch from perforce   In the two companies I used it it was more than adequate   Those were both companies with disparate offices  but the offices were set up with plenty of infrastructure so there was no need to have the disjoint disconnected features     How many developers are you talking about changing over   The real question is - what is it about perforce that is not meeting your organization s needs that git can provide   And similarly  what weaknesses does git have compared to perforce   If you can t answer that yourself then asking here won t help   You need to find a business case for your company    e g  Perhaps it is with lower overall cost of ownership  that includes loss of productivity for the interim learning stage  higher admin costs  at least initially   etc    I think you are in for a tough sell - perforce is a pretty good one to try to replace   It is a no brainer if you are trying to boot out pvcs or ssafe

User · Answer

It would take me a lot of convincing to switch from perforce   In the two companies I used it it was more than adequate   Those were both companies with disparate offices  but the offices were set up with plenty of infrastructure so there was no need to have the disjoint disconnected features     How many developers are you talking about changing over   The real question is - what is it about perforce that is not meeting your organization s needs that git can provide   And similarly  what weaknesses does git have compared to perforce   If you can t answer that yourself then asking here won t help   You need to find a business case for your company    e g  Perhaps it is with lower overall cost of ownership  that includes loss of productivity for the interim learning stage  higher admin costs  at least initially   etc    I think you are in for a tough sell - perforce is a pretty good one to try to replace   It is a no brainer if you are trying to boot out pvcs or ssafe

User · Answer

Here s what I don t like about git   First of all  I think the distributed idea flies in the face of reality  Everybody who s actually using git is doing so in a centralised way  even Linus Torvalds  If the kernel was managed in a distributed way  that would mean I couldn t actually download the  official  kernel sources - there wouldn t be one - I d have to decide whether I want Linus  version  or Joe s version  or Bill s version  That would obviously be ridiculous  and that s why there is an official definition which Linus controls using a centralised workflow   If you accept that you want a centralised definition of your stuff  then it becomes clear that the server and client roles are completely different  so the dogma that the client and server softwares should be the same becomes purely limiting  The dogma that the client and server data should be the same becomes patently ridiculous  especially in a codebase that s got fifteen years of history that nobody cares about but everybody would have to clone   What we actually want to do with all that old stuff is bung it in a cupboard and forget that it s there  just like any normal VCS does  The fact that git hauls it all back and forth over the network every day is very dangerous  because it nags you to prune it  That pruning involves a lot of tedious decisions and it can go wrong  So people will probably keep a whole series of snapshot repos from various points in history  but wasn t that what source control was for in the first place  This problem didn t exist until somebody invented the distributed model   Git actively encourages people to rewrite history  and the above is probably one reason for that  Every normal VCS makes rewriting history impossible for all but the admins  and makes sure the admins have no reason to consider it  Correct me if I m wrong  but as far as I know  git provides no way to grant normal users write access but ban them from rewriting history  That means any developer with a grudge  or who was still struggling with the learning curve  could trash the whole codebase  How do we tighten that one  Well  either you make regular backups of the entire history  i e  you keep history squared  or you ban write access to all except some poor sod who would receive all the diffs by email and merge them by hand   Let s take an example of a well-funded  large project and see how git is working for them  Android  I once decided to have a play with the android system itself  I found out that I was supposed to use a bunch of scripts called repo to get at their git  Some of repo runs on the client and some on the server  but both  by their very existence  are illustrating the fact that git is incomplete in either capacity  What happened is that I was unable to pull the sources for about a week and then gave up altogether  I would have had to pull a truly vast amount of data from several different repositories  but the server was completely overloaded with people like me  Repo was timing out and was unable to resume from where it had timed out  If git is so distributable  you d have thought that they d have done some kind of peer-to-peer thing to relieve the load on that one server  Git is distributable  but it s not a server  Git repo is a server  but repo is not distributable cos it s just an ad-hoc collection of hacks   A similar illustration of git s inadequacy is gitolite  and its ancestor which apparently didn t work out so well   Gitolite describes its job as easing the deployment of a git server  Again  the very existence of this thing proves that git is not a server  any more than it is a client  What s more  it never will be  because if it grew into either it would be betraying it s founding principles    Even if you did believe in the distributed thing  git would still be a mess  What  for instance  is a branch  They say that you implicitly make a branch every time you clone a repository  but that can t be the same thing as a branch in a single repository  So that s at least two different things being referred to as branches  But then  you can also rewind in a repo and just start editing  Is that like the second type of branch  or something different again  Maybe it depends what type of repo you ve got - oh yes - apparently the repo is not a very clear concept either  There are normal ones and bare ones  You can t push to a normal one because the bare part might get out of sync with its source tree  But you can t cvsimport to a bare one cos they didn t think of that  So you have to cvsimport to a normal one  clone that to a bare one which developers hit  and cvsexport that to a cvs working copy which still has to be checked into cvs  Who can be bothered  Where did all these complications come from  From the distributed idea itself  I ditched gitolite in the end because it was imposing even more of these restrictions on me   Git says that branching should be light  but many companies already have a serious rogue branch problem so I d have thought that branching should be a momentous decision with strict policing  This is where perforce really shines     In perforce you rarely need branches because you can juggle changesets in a very agile way  For instance  the usual workflow is that you sync to the last known good version on mainline  then write your feature  Whenever you attempt to modify a file  the diff of that file gets added to your  default changeset   When you attempt to check in the changeset  it automatically tries to merge the news from mainline into your changeset  effectively rebasing it  and then commits  This workflow is enforced without you even needing to understand it  Mainline thus collects a history of changes which you can quite easily cherry pick your way through later  For instance  suppose you want to revert an old one  say  the one before the one before last  You sync to the moment before the offending change  mark the affected files as part of the changeset  sync to the moment after and merge with  always mine    There was something very interesting there  syncing doesn t mean having the same thing - if a file is editable  i e  in an active changeset  it won t be clobbered by the sync but marked as due for resolving    Now you have a changelist that undoes the offending one  Merge in the subsequent news and you have a changelist that you can plop on top of mainline to have the desired effect  At no point did we rewrite any history   Now  supposing half way through this process  somebody runs up to you and tells you to drop everything and fix some bug  You just give your default changelist a name  a number actually  then  suspend  it  fix the bug in the now empty default changelist  commit it  and resume the named changelist  It s typical to have several changelists suspended at a time where you try different things out  It s easy and private  You get what you really want from a branch regime without the temptation to procrastinate or chicken out of merging to mainline   I suppose it would be theoretically possible to do something similar in git  but git makes practically anything possible rather than asserting a workflow we approve of  The centralised model is a bunch of valid simplifications relative to the distributed model which is an invalid generalisation  It s so overgeneralised that it basically expects you to implement source control on top of it  as repo does   The other thing is replication  In git  anything is possible so you have to figure it out for yourself  In perforce  you get an effectively stateless cache  The only configuration it needs to know is where the master is  and the clients can point at either the master or the cache at their discretion  That s a five minute job and it can t go wrong   You ve also got triggers and customisable forms for asserting code reviews  bugzilla references etc  and of course  you have branches for when you actually need them  It s not clearcase  but it s close  and it s dead easy to set up and maintain   All in all  I think that if you know you re going to work in a centralised way  which everybody does  you might as well use a tool that was designed with that in mind  Git is overrated because of Linus  fearsome wit together with peoples  tendency to follow each other around like sheep  but its main raison d etre doesn t actually stand up to common sense  and by following it  git ties its own hands with the two huge dogmas that  a  the software and  b  the data have to be the same at both client and server  and that will always make it complicated and lame at the centralised job

User · Answer

The one important difference between Perforce and git  and the one most commonly mentioned  is their respective handling of huge binary files   Like  for example  in this blog of an employee at a video game development company  http   corearchitecture blogspot com 2011 09 git-vs-perforce-from-game-development html  However  the important thing is that  the speed difference between git and perforce  when you have a huge 6gb repository  containing everything from documentation to every binary ever built  and finally  oh yes  the actual source history   usually comes from the fact that huge companies tend to run Perforce  and so they set it up to offload all significant operations to the huge server bank in the basement   This important advantage on Perforce s part comes only from a factor that has nothing whatsoever to do with Perforce  the fact that the company running it can afford said server bank   And  anyway  in the end  Perforce and git are different products  Git was designed to be solely a VCS  and it does this far better than Perforce  in that it has more features  which are generally easier to use  in particular  in the words of another  branching in Perforce is like performing open-heart surgery  it should only be done by experts  P     http   stevehanov ca blog index php id 50    Any other benefits which companies that use Perforce gain have come merely because Perforce is not solely a VCS  it s also a fileserver  as well as having a host of other features for testing the performance of builds  etc   Finally  Git being open-source and far more flexible to boot  it would not be so hard to patch git to offload important operations to a central server  running mounds of expensive hardware

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The Perl  160 5 interpreter source code is currently going through the throes of converting from Perforce to git  Maybe Sam Vilain   s git-p4raw importer is of interest   In any case  one of the major wins you   re going to have over every centralised VCS and most distributed ones also is raw  blistering speed  You can   t imagine how liberating it is to have the entire project history at hand  mere fractions of fractions of a second away  until you have experienced it  Even generating a commit log of the whole project history that includes a full diff for each commit can be measured in fractions of a second  Git is so fast your hat will fly off  VCSs that have to roundtrip over the network simply have no chance of competing  not even over a Gigabit Ethernet link   Also  git makes it very easy to be carefully selective when making commits  thereby allowing changes in your working copy  or even within a single file  to be spread out over multiple commits     and across different branches if you need that  This allows you to make fewer mental notes while working     you don   t need to plan out your work so carefully  deciding up front what set of changes you   ll commit and making sure to postpone anything else  You can just make any changes you want as they occur to you  and still untangle them     nearly always quite easily     when it   s time to commit  The stash can be a very big help here   I have found that together  these facts cause me to naturally make many more and much more focused commits than before I used git  This in turn not only makes your history generally more useful  but is particularly beneficial for value-add tools such as git bisect   I   m sure there are more things I can   t think of right now  One problem with the proposition of selling your team on git is that many benefits are interrelated and play off each other  as I hinted at above  such that it is hard to simply look at a list of features and benefits of git and infer how they are going to change your workflow  and which changes are going to be bonafide improvements  You need to take this into account  and you also need to explicitly point it out

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I have no experience with Git  but I have with Mercurial which is also a distributed VCS  It depends on the project really  but in our case a distributed VCS suited the project as basically eliminated frequent broken builds   I think it depends on the project really  as some are better suited towards a client-server VCS  and others towads a distributed one

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I think in terms of keeping people happy during  post switch over  one of things to get across early is just how private a local branch can be in Git  and how much freedom that gives them to make mistakes  Get them all to clone themselves a few private branches from the current code and then go wild in there  experimenting  Rename some files  check stuff in  merge things from another branch  rewind history  rebase one set of changes on top of another  and so on  Show how even their worst accidents locally have no consequences for their colleagues  What you want is a situation where developers feel safe  so they can learn faster  since Git has a steep learning curve that s important  and then eventually so that they re more effective as developers   When you re trying to learn a centralised tool  obviously you will be worried about making some goof that causes problems for other users of the repository  The fear of embarrassment alone is enough to discourage people from experimenting   Even having a special  training  repository doesn t help  because inevitably developers will encounter a situation in the production system that they never saw during training  and so they re back to worrying   But Git s distributed nature does away with this  You can try any experiment in a local branch  and if it goes horribly wrong  just throw the branch away and nobody needs to know  Since you can create a local branch of anything  you can replicate a problem you re seeing with the real live repository  yet have no danger of  breaking the build  or otherwise making a fool of yourself  You can check absolutely everything in  as soon as you ve done it  no trying to batch work up into neat little packages  So not just the two major code changes you spent four hours on today  but also that build fix that you remembered half way through  and the spelling mistake in the documentation you spotted while explaining something to a colleague  and so on  And if the major changes are abandoned because the project is changing direction  you can cherry pick the build fix and the spelling mistake out of your branch and keep those with no hassle

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I use Perforce at work  I also use Git because I would still like some form of version control when I m working on code and can t connect to the server  No  reconcile offline work just is not the same  Here is where I ve found git to be a great benefit    Branching speed - git takes a few seconds at most  Conflicts - P4Merge s auto resolve destroyed a week s worth of work once  Ever since then I would rather resolve by hand when merging  When Git prompts me about a conflict  it is actually a conflict  The rest of the time  git resolves stuff correctly and I save heaps of time  Keeping track of merges - If you have one branch that is continuously receiving merges from two other branches  you know what a headache this can be with perforce  With git  the headache is minimized because the result of a merge in git is actually a new commit which knows who its ancestors are  Permissions - I have lost track of the number of times I ve tried to work on a file but couldn t because it was not checked out in Perforce  If you worked with XCode  or any editor that does not have a solid Perforce SCM plugin  offline  you know how irritating this can get  I don t have to worry about that with Git  I make my changes  Git does not stop me and tracks them in the background  Keeping the main tree tidy - With git  I can sort my commits and tidy the code up so that the history looks nice and tidy  None of that  checking in this file because it was supposed to be part of the previous checkin  rubbish  I squash commits like that  because they help nobody  Stashing - Your perforce server needs to be version 2010 1 or newer to use the p4 shelve command  Creating patches - Easy to do in git  Don t know if it is possible in Perforce without using the command line   Mailing patches from the GUI - again  git wins here  Disk space - With perforce  every branch is a copy  That means if your source tree is huge  your disk space gets eaten up fast  This is not even counting the additional space once you start building  Why even have a link between branches and disk space  With git  you can have 100 branches and only one branch at a time ever exists  If you specifically want to work on two versions simultaneously you can clone  do your work and then get rid of one clone if you want  without losing anything  If you re on XCode4  perforce support has been dropped and git support is now built in  If you do cross platform work like I do  this matters a lot  With Visual Studio  you can use git extensions  With perforce  it s equally yuck on both OSes  Well  maybe a little more on mac now with XCode4 on the scene  Finding the faulty checkin  or  git bisect rules  - Ever tried to do a binary search with perforce to figure out where a bug was introduced  Quite a hassle  yes  Even more of a hassle when there have been integrates from other branches in the middle  Why  Because there is no automation for such tasks  You need to write your own tool to talk to perforce and you usually don t have the time  With git  you give it the starting points  the  good  point and the  bad  point  and it automates the search for you  Even better  if you have a script that can automate the build and test process  you can hook git up to the script and the whole process of finding the checkin is automated  That is how it should be   Tracking changes across refactors - Try splitting BigClass into SmallClass1 and SmallClass2  To Perforce  BigClass has now ceased to exist and two new classes  SmallClass1 and SmallClass2 have joined the source tree   To Perforce  there is no relation between BigClass and SmallClass1 and SmallClass2  Git  on the other hand  is smart enough to know that x  of BigClass is now in SmallClass1 and y  of BigClass is in SmallClass2 and that BigClass has ceased to exist  Now  from the point of view of someone who is reviewing changes across multiple branches  you tell me which approach you d find more useful - Git s or Perforce s  Personally  I prefer Git s approach because it more accurately reflects the actual change in the code  Git is able to do this because it tracks content within the file and not the file itself  Centralized or decentralized  Git is a DVCS system while perforce is centralized  A centralized VCS cannot be decentralized later  but a DVCS  especially git  can be centralized  There are several products that add very fine grained access control to git  if that is something the business needs  Personally  I would go with a system that gives me greater flexibility in the long term  Branch mappings  If you want to do branching right in Perforce  you need to create a branch mapping  There are reasons for this  but they are tied to how Perforce conceptualizes a branch  As a developer  or a team  this simply means one more step in the work flow  which I do not consider efficient at all  Sharing work between teams  With Perforce  you cannot break up a submission  Team A is working on feature A  Team B on feature B  Team C works on bug fixes  Now  Teams A  amp  B have to fix a bunch of bugs in order to implement their features  The only thing is  they weren t so disciplined when committing their changes  probably because they re rushing to a deadline  and so their  bug fixes  are parts of larger submissions that also contain new stuff as far as version control on their branches are concerned  However  Team C is now doing a point release and would like to get the bug fixes from the other teams  If they were using Git  Team C could cherry pick the other teams  relevant changes  split them up and only take what they needed without worrying about introducing any partially implemented features  With Perforce  Team C can get the affected files  but would have to separate the relevant changes using a much more manual process   Changing platform - If  for whatever reason in the future  you  decide to change your platform of choice  with Perforce  you re at  the mercy of Perforce com and the availability of the tools for the  platform of your choosing  Changing to future amazing source control engine X - If you decide  to change what you use for source control  extracting your source  control history from Perforce and moving it to new system X is  going to be a nightmare  because it is closed source and the best you  can do is guess - just Google for Perforce to Git migration to get  a sense of what I m talking about  At least with Git  its open  source  so it eliminates a lot of the guesswork involved    Well  that s my 2 cents  In Perforce s defense  I gotta say their customer support rules and so does their Time Lapse View tool  I do not know how to get a time lapse view with git  But for the convenience and time saved  I d go with git any day

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Apparently GitHub now offer git training courses to companies  Quoth their blog post about it      I   ve been down to the Google campus a number of times in the last few weeks helping to train the Androids there in Git   I was asked by Shawn Pearce  you may know him from his Git and EGit JGit glory     he is the hero that takes over maintanance when Junio is out of town  to come in to help him train the Google engineers working on Andriod in transitioning from Perforce to Git  so Android could be shared with the masses   I can tell you I was more than happy to do it                  Logical Awesome is now officially offering this type of custom training service to all companies  where we can help your organization with training and planning if you are thinking about switching to Git as well    Emphasis mine

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What Perforce features are people using   Multiple workspaces on a single machineNumbered changelistsDeveloper branchesIntegration with IDE  Visual Studio  Eclipse  SlickEdit      Many build variantsComposite workspacesIntegrating some fixes but not othersetcI ask because if all folks are doing is get and put from the command line  git has that covered  and so do all the other RTS

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The one important difference between Perforce and git  and the one most commonly mentioned  is their respective handling of huge binary files   Like  for example  in this blog of an employee at a video game development company  http   corearchitecture blogspot com 2011 09 git-vs-perforce-from-game-development html  However  the important thing is that  the speed difference between git and perforce  when you have a huge 6gb repository  containing everything from documentation to every binary ever built  and finally  oh yes  the actual source history   usually comes from the fact that huge companies tend to run Perforce  and so they set it up to offload all significant operations to the huge server bank in the basement   This important advantage on Perforce s part comes only from a factor that has nothing whatsoever to do with Perforce  the fact that the company running it can afford said server bank   And  anyway  in the end  Perforce and git are different products  Git was designed to be solely a VCS  and it does this far better than Perforce  in that it has more features  which are generally easier to use  in particular  in the words of another  branching in Perforce is like performing open-heart surgery  it should only be done by experts  P     http   stevehanov ca blog index php id 50    Any other benefits which companies that use Perforce gain have come merely because Perforce is not solely a VCS  it s also a fileserver  as well as having a host of other features for testing the performance of builds  etc   Finally  Git being open-source and far more flexible to boot  it would not be so hard to patch git to offload important operations to a central server  running mounds of expensive hardware

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I think in terms of keeping people happy during  post switch over  one of things to get across early is just how private a local branch can be in Git  and how much freedom that gives them to make mistakes  Get them all to clone themselves a few private branches from the current code and then go wild in there  experimenting  Rename some files  check stuff in  merge things from another branch  rewind history  rebase one set of changes on top of another  and so on  Show how even their worst accidents locally have no consequences for their colleagues  What you want is a situation where developers feel safe  so they can learn faster  since Git has a steep learning curve that s important  and then eventually so that they re more effective as developers   When you re trying to learn a centralised tool  obviously you will be worried about making some goof that causes problems for other users of the repository  The fear of embarrassment alone is enough to discourage people from experimenting   Even having a special  training  repository doesn t help  because inevitably developers will encounter a situation in the production system that they never saw during training  and so they re back to worrying   But Git s distributed nature does away with this  You can try any experiment in a local branch  and if it goes horribly wrong  just throw the branch away and nobody needs to know  Since you can create a local branch of anything  you can replicate a problem you re seeing with the real live repository  yet have no danger of  breaking the build  or otherwise making a fool of yourself  You can check absolutely everything in  as soon as you ve done it  no trying to batch work up into neat little packages  So not just the two major code changes you spent four hours on today  but also that build fix that you remembered half way through  and the spelling mistake in the documentation you spotted while explaining something to a colleague  and so on  And if the major changes are abandoned because the project is changing direction  you can cherry pick the build fix and the spelling mistake out of your branch and keep those with no hassle

User · Answer

Apparently GitHub now offer git training courses to companies  Quoth their blog post about it      I   ve been down to the Google campus a number of times in the last few weeks helping to train the Androids there in Git   I was asked by Shawn Pearce  you may know him from his Git and EGit JGit glory     he is the hero that takes over maintanance when Junio is out of town  to come in to help him train the Google engineers working on Andriod in transitioning from Perforce to Git  so Android could be shared with the masses   I can tell you I was more than happy to do it                  Logical Awesome is now officially offering this type of custom training service to all companies  where we can help your organization with training and planning if you are thinking about switching to Git as well    Emphasis mine

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The Perl  160 5 interpreter source code is currently going through the throes of converting from Perforce to git  Maybe Sam Vilain   s git-p4raw importer is of interest   In any case  one of the major wins you   re going to have over every centralised VCS and most distributed ones also is raw  blistering speed  You can   t imagine how liberating it is to have the entire project history at hand  mere fractions of fractions of a second away  until you have experienced it  Even generating a commit log of the whole project history that includes a full diff for each commit can be measured in fractions of a second  Git is so fast your hat will fly off  VCSs that have to roundtrip over the network simply have no chance of competing  not even over a Gigabit Ethernet link   Also  git makes it very easy to be carefully selective when making commits  thereby allowing changes in your working copy  or even within a single file  to be spread out over multiple commits     and across different branches if you need that  This allows you to make fewer mental notes while working     you don   t need to plan out your work so carefully  deciding up front what set of changes you   ll commit and making sure to postpone anything else  You can just make any changes you want as they occur to you  and still untangle them     nearly always quite easily     when it   s time to commit  The stash can be a very big help here   I have found that together  these facts cause me to naturally make many more and much more focused commits than before I used git  This in turn not only makes your history generally more useful  but is particularly beneficial for value-add tools such as git bisect   I   m sure there are more things I can   t think of right now  One problem with the proposition of selling your team on git is that many benefits are interrelated and play off each other  as I hinted at above  such that it is hard to simply look at a list of features and benefits of git and infer how they are going to change your workflow  and which changes are going to be bonafide improvements  You need to take this into account  and you also need to explicitly point it out

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It would take me a lot of convincing to switch from perforce   In the two companies I used it it was more than adequate   Those were both companies with disparate offices  but the offices were set up with plenty of infrastructure so there was no need to have the disjoint disconnected features     How many developers are you talking about changing over   The real question is - what is it about perforce that is not meeting your organization s needs that git can provide   And similarly  what weaknesses does git have compared to perforce   If you can t answer that yourself then asking here won t help   You need to find a business case for your company    e g  Perhaps it is with lower overall cost of ownership  that includes loss of productivity for the interim learning stage  higher admin costs  at least initially   etc    I think you are in for a tough sell - perforce is a pretty good one to try to replace   It is a no brainer if you are trying to boot out pvcs or ssafe

User · Answer

Apparently GitHub now offer git training courses to companies  Quoth their blog post about it      I   ve been down to the Google campus a number of times in the last few weeks helping to train the Androids there in Git   I was asked by Shawn Pearce  you may know him from his Git and EGit JGit glory     he is the hero that takes over maintanance when Junio is out of town  to come in to help him train the Google engineers working on Andriod in transitioning from Perforce to Git  so Android could be shared with the masses   I can tell you I was more than happy to do it                  Logical Awesome is now officially offering this type of custom training service to all companies  where we can help your organization with training and planning if you are thinking about switching to Git as well    Emphasis mine

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The Perl  160 5 interpreter source code is currently going through the throes of converting from Perforce to git  Maybe Sam Vilain   s git-p4raw importer is of interest   In any case  one of the major wins you   re going to have over every centralised VCS and most distributed ones also is raw  blistering speed  You can   t imagine how liberating it is to have the entire project history at hand  mere fractions of fractions of a second away  until you have experienced it  Even generating a commit log of the whole project history that includes a full diff for each commit can be measured in fractions of a second  Git is so fast your hat will fly off  VCSs that have to roundtrip over the network simply have no chance of competing  not even over a Gigabit Ethernet link   Also  git makes it very easy to be carefully selective when making commits  thereby allowing changes in your working copy  or even within a single file  to be spread out over multiple commits     and across different branches if you need that  This allows you to make fewer mental notes while working     you don   t need to plan out your work so carefully  deciding up front what set of changes you   ll commit and making sure to postpone anything else  You can just make any changes you want as they occur to you  and still untangle them     nearly always quite easily     when it   s time to commit  The stash can be a very big help here   I have found that together  these facts cause me to naturally make many more and much more focused commits than before I used git  This in turn not only makes your history generally more useful  but is particularly beneficial for value-add tools such as git bisect   I   m sure there are more things I can   t think of right now  One problem with the proposition of selling your team on git is that many benefits are interrelated and play off each other  as I hinted at above  such that it is hard to simply look at a list of features and benefits of git and infer how they are going to change your workflow  and which changes are going to be bonafide improvements  You need to take this into account  and you also need to explicitly point it out

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The command that sold me on git personally was bisect  I don t think that this feature is available in any other version control system as of now    That being said  if people are used to a GUI client for source control they are not going to be impressed with git  Right now the only full-featured client is command-line

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The command that sold me on git personally was bisect  I don t think that this feature is available in any other version control system as of now    That being said  if people are used to a GUI client for source control they are not going to be impressed with git  Right now the only full-featured client is command-line

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What Perforce features are people using   Multiple workspaces on a single machineNumbered changelistsDeveloper branchesIntegration with IDE  Visual Studio  Eclipse  SlickEdit      Many build variantsComposite workspacesIntegrating some fixes but not othersetcI ask because if all folks are doing is get and put from the command line  git has that covered  and so do all the other RTS

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I have no experience with Git  but I have with Mercurial which is also a distributed VCS  It depends on the project really  but in our case a distributed VCS suited the project as basically eliminated frequent broken builds   I think it depends on the project really  as some are better suited towards a client-server VCS  and others towads a distributed one

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We have been using Git for sometime  recently our Git server s harddrive crashed and we could not revert back to the latest state  We managed to get back to few days old state  When the server was back up  Everyone in the team pulled pushed their changes and voila  the server is back to current state

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We have been using Git for sometime  recently our Git server s harddrive crashed and we could not revert back to the latest state  We managed to get back to few days old state  When the server was back up  Everyone in the team pulled pushed their changes and voila  the server is back to current state

User · Answer

What Perforce features are people using   Multiple workspaces on a single machineNumbered changelistsDeveloper branchesIntegration with IDE  Visual Studio  Eclipse  SlickEdit      Many build variantsComposite workspacesIntegrating some fixes but not othersetcI ask because if all folks are doing is get and put from the command line  git has that covered  and so do all the other RTS

User · Answer

What Perforce features are people using   Multiple workspaces on a single machineNumbered changelistsDeveloper branchesIntegration with IDE  Visual Studio  Eclipse  SlickEdit      Many build variantsComposite workspacesIntegrating some fixes but not othersetcI ask because if all folks are doing is get and put from the command line  git has that covered  and so do all the other RTS

User · Answer

I have no experience with Git  but I have with Mercurial which is also a distributed VCS  It depends on the project really  but in our case a distributed VCS suited the project as basically eliminated frequent broken builds   I think it depends on the project really  as some are better suited towards a client-server VCS  and others towads a distributed one

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Using GIT as substitute for bad code line management is common  Many of the disadvantages of Perforce are a result of bad branching strategies  The same for any other centralized tool  If you have to create a ton of branches you are doing something wrong  Why do developers need to create so many branches   Also  why is working disconnected so important anyway  Just so someone can work on a train  That s about the only place these days you can t get a wireless connection  And even most trains have decent WiFi

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I think the one thing that I know GIT wins on is it s ability to  preserve line endings  on all files  whereas perforce seems to insist on translating them into either Unix  Dos Windows or MacOS9 format    n     r n  or   r    This is a real pain if you re writing Unix scripts in a Windows environment  or a mixed OS environment  It s not even possible to set the rule on a per-file-extension basis  For instance  it would convert  sh   bash   unix files to Unix format  and convert  ccp   bat or  com files to Dos Windows format   In GIT  I m not sure if that s default  an option or the only option  you can set it up to  preserve line endings   That means  you can manually change the line endings of a file  and then GIT will leave that format the way it is  This seems to me like the ideal way to do things  and I don t understand why this isn t an option with Perforce   The only way you can achieve this behavior  is to mark the files as binary  As I see that  that would be a nasty hack to workaround a missing feature  Apart from being tedious to have to do on all scripts  etc  it would also probably break most diffs  etc   The  solution  that we ve settled for at the moment  is to run a sed command to remove all carriage returns from the scripts every time they re deployed to their Unix environment  This isn t ideal either  especially since some of them are deployed inside WAR files  and the sed line has to be run again when they re unpacked   This is just something I think gives GIT a great advantage  and which I don t think has been mentioned above   EDIT  After having been using Perforce for a bit longer  I d like to add another couple of comments   A  Something I really miss in Perforce is a clear and instance diff  including changed  removed and added files  This is available in GIT with the git diff command  but in Perforce  files have to be checked out before their changes are recorded  and while you might have your main editors  like Eclipse  set up to automatically check files out when you edit them  you might sometimes edit files in other ways  notepad  unix commands  etc   And new files don t seem to be added automatically at all  even using Eclipse and p4eclipse  which can be rather annoying  So to find all changes  you have to run a  Diff against     on the entire workspace  which first of all takes a while to run  and secondly includes all kind of irrelevant things unless you set up very complicated exclusion lists  which leads me to the next point   B  In GIT I find the  gitignore very simple and easy to manage  read and understand  However  the workspace ignore exclude lists configurable in Perforce seem unwieldy and unnecessarily complex  I haven t been able to get any exclusions with wildcards working  I would like to do something like  -  Server mainline     target         Svend Hansen Server     target       To exclude all target folders within all projects inside Server mainline  However  this doesn t seem to work like I would have expected  and I ve ended up adding a line for every project like   -  Server mainline projectA target        Svend Hansen Server projectA target     -  Server mainline projectB target        Svend Hansen Server projectB target           And similar lines for bin folders   classpath and  projet files and more   C  In Perforce there are the rather useful changelists  However  assume I make a group of changes  check them all and put them in a changelist  to then work on something else before submitting that changelist  If I later make a change to one of the files included in the first changelist  that file will still be in that changelist  and I can t just later submit the changelist assuming that it only contains the changes that I originally added  though it will be the same files   In GIT  if you add a file and them make further changes to it  those changes will not have been added  and would still show in a git diff and you wouldn t be able to commit the file without first adding the new changes as well  Of course  this isn t usefull in the same way the changelist can be as you only have one set of added files  but in GIT you can just commit the changes  as that doesn t actually push them  You could them work on other changes before pushing them  but you wouldn t be able to push anything else that you add later  without pushing the former changes as well

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I have been using Perforce for a long time and recently I also started to use GIT. Here is my "objective" opinion:

Perforce features:

GUI tools seem to be more feature rich (e.g. Time lapse view, Revision graph)
Speed when syncing to head revision (no overhead of transferring whole history)
Eclipse/Visual Studio Integration is really nice
You can develop multiple features in one branch per Changelist (I am still not 100% sure if this is an advantage over GIT)
You can "spy" what other developers are doing - what kind of files they have checked out.

GIT features:

I got impressions that GIT command line is much simpler than Perforce (init/clone, add, commit. No configuration of complex Workspaces)
Speed when accessing project history after a checkout (comes at a cost of copying whole history when syncing)
Offline mode (developers will not complain that unreachable P4 server will prohibit them from coding)
Creating a new branches is much faster
The "main" GIT server does not need plenty of TBytes of storage, because each developer can have it's own local sandbox
GIT is OpenSource - no Licensing fees
If your Company is contributing also to OpenSource projects then sharing patches is way much easier with GIT

Overall for OpenSource/Distributed projects I would always recommend GIT, because it is more like a P2P application and everyone can participate in development. For example, I remember that when I was doing remote development with Perforce I was syncing 4GB Projects over 1Mbps link once in a week. Alot of time was simply wasted because of that. Also we needed set up VPN to do that.

If you have a small company and P4 server will be always up then I would say that Perforce is also a very good option.

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I use Perforce at work  I also use Git because I would still like some form of version control when I m working on code and can t connect to the server  No  reconcile offline work just is not the same  Here is where I ve found git to be a great benefit    Branching speed - git takes a few seconds at most  Conflicts - P4Merge s auto resolve destroyed a week s worth of work once  Ever since then I would rather resolve by hand when merging  When Git prompts me about a conflict  it is actually a conflict  The rest of the time  git resolves stuff correctly and I save heaps of time  Keeping track of merges - If you have one branch that is continuously receiving merges from two other branches  you know what a headache this can be with perforce  With git  the headache is minimized because the result of a merge in git is actually a new commit which knows who its ancestors are  Permissions - I have lost track of the number of times I ve tried to work on a file but couldn t because it was not checked out in Perforce  If you worked with XCode  or any editor that does not have a solid Perforce SCM plugin  offline  you know how irritating this can get  I don t have to worry about that with Git  I make my changes  Git does not stop me and tracks them in the background  Keeping the main tree tidy - With git  I can sort my commits and tidy the code up so that the history looks nice and tidy  None of that  checking in this file because it was supposed to be part of the previous checkin  rubbish  I squash commits like that  because they help nobody  Stashing - Your perforce server needs to be version 2010 1 or newer to use the p4 shelve command  Creating patches - Easy to do in git  Don t know if it is possible in Perforce without using the command line   Mailing patches from the GUI - again  git wins here  Disk space - With perforce  every branch is a copy  That means if your source tree is huge  your disk space gets eaten up fast  This is not even counting the additional space once you start building  Why even have a link between branches and disk space  With git  you can have 100 branches and only one branch at a time ever exists  If you specifically want to work on two versions simultaneously you can clone  do your work and then get rid of one clone if you want  without losing anything  If you re on XCode4  perforce support has been dropped and git support is now built in  If you do cross platform work like I do  this matters a lot  With Visual Studio  you can use git extensions  With perforce  it s equally yuck on both OSes  Well  maybe a little more on mac now with XCode4 on the scene  Finding the faulty checkin  or  git bisect rules  - Ever tried to do a binary search with perforce to figure out where a bug was introduced  Quite a hassle  yes  Even more of a hassle when there have been integrates from other branches in the middle  Why  Because there is no automation for such tasks  You need to write your own tool to talk to perforce and you usually don t have the time  With git  you give it the starting points  the  good  point and the  bad  point  and it automates the search for you  Even better  if you have a script that can automate the build and test process  you can hook git up to the script and the whole process of finding the checkin is automated  That is how it should be   Tracking changes across refactors - Try splitting BigClass into SmallClass1 and SmallClass2  To Perforce  BigClass has now ceased to exist and two new classes  SmallClass1 and SmallClass2 have joined the source tree   To Perforce  there is no relation between BigClass and SmallClass1 and SmallClass2  Git  on the other hand  is smart enough to know that x  of BigClass is now in SmallClass1 and y  of BigClass is in SmallClass2 and that BigClass has ceased to exist  Now  from the point of view of someone who is reviewing changes across multiple branches  you tell me which approach you d find more useful - Git s or Perforce s  Personally  I prefer Git s approach because it more accurately reflects the actual change in the code  Git is able to do this because it tracks content within the file and not the file itself  Centralized or decentralized  Git is a DVCS system while perforce is centralized  A centralized VCS cannot be decentralized later  but a DVCS  especially git  can be centralized  There are several products that add very fine grained access control to git  if that is something the business needs  Personally  I would go with a system that gives me greater flexibility in the long term  Branch mappings  If you want to do branching right in Perforce  you need to create a branch mapping  There are reasons for this  but they are tied to how Perforce conceptualizes a branch  As a developer  or a team  this simply means one more step in the work flow  which I do not consider efficient at all  Sharing work between teams  With Perforce  you cannot break up a submission  Team A is working on feature A  Team B on feature B  Team C works on bug fixes  Now  Teams A  amp  B have to fix a bunch of bugs in order to implement their features  The only thing is  they weren t so disciplined when committing their changes  probably because they re rushing to a deadline  and so their  bug fixes  are parts of larger submissions that also contain new stuff as far as version control on their branches are concerned  However  Team C is now doing a point release and would like to get the bug fixes from the other teams  If they were using Git  Team C could cherry pick the other teams  relevant changes  split them up and only take what they needed without worrying about introducing any partially implemented features  With Perforce  Team C can get the affected files  but would have to separate the relevant changes using a much more manual process   Changing platform - If  for whatever reason in the future  you  decide to change your platform of choice  with Perforce  you re at  the mercy of Perforce com and the availability of the tools for the  platform of your choosing  Changing to future amazing source control engine X - If you decide  to change what you use for source control  extracting your source  control history from Perforce and moving it to new system X is  going to be a nightmare  because it is closed source and the best you  can do is guess - just Google for Perforce to Git migration to get  a sense of what I m talking about  At least with Git  its open  source  so it eliminates a lot of the guesswork involved    Well  that s my 2 cents  In Perforce s defense  I gotta say their customer support rules and so does their Time Lapse View tool  I do not know how to get a time lapse view with git  But for the convenience and time saved  I d go with git any day

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The Perl  160 5 interpreter source code is currently going through the throes of converting from Perforce to git  Maybe Sam Vilain   s git-p4raw importer is of interest   In any case  one of the major wins you   re going to have over every centralised VCS and most distributed ones also is raw  blistering speed  You can   t imagine how liberating it is to have the entire project history at hand  mere fractions of fractions of a second away  until you have experienced it  Even generating a commit log of the whole project history that includes a full diff for each commit can be measured in fractions of a second  Git is so fast your hat will fly off  VCSs that have to roundtrip over the network simply have no chance of competing  not even over a Gigabit Ethernet link   Also  git makes it very easy to be carefully selective when making commits  thereby allowing changes in your working copy  or even within a single file  to be spread out over multiple commits     and across different branches if you need that  This allows you to make fewer mental notes while working     you don   t need to plan out your work so carefully  deciding up front what set of changes you   ll commit and making sure to postpone anything else  You can just make any changes you want as they occur to you  and still untangle them     nearly always quite easily     when it   s time to commit  The stash can be a very big help here   I have found that together  these facts cause me to naturally make many more and much more focused commits than before I used git  This in turn not only makes your history generally more useful  but is particularly beneficial for value-add tools such as git bisect   I   m sure there are more things I can   t think of right now  One problem with the proposition of selling your team on git is that many benefits are interrelated and play off each other  as I hinted at above  such that it is hard to simply look at a list of features and benefits of git and infer how they are going to change your workflow  and which changes are going to be bonafide improvements  You need to take this into account  and you also need to explicitly point it out

[git] GIT vs. Perforce- Two VCS will enter... one will leave

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