You ask a good question.

I'm sorry I don't have the answers for you. I can compare Perforce to ClearCase, to Visual SourceSafe, and to RCS/SCCS systems, since I've used each of them. Is Perforce better than each of those? FOR MY NEEDS, yes. If I had to track a very complex environment, and had infinite hardware/stafftime/ net-bandwidth resources, and didn't care about automation, and had a completely homogenous development environment, I might *maybe* take a contract doing ClearCase work, but it wouldn't be an easy decision to make. (Honestly, probably wouldn't do such a contract. Still, hunger is a strong motivation at times.)

Make no mistake: VSS is a piece of trash from the beginning, and RCS/SCCS systems are pretty small potatoes for tiny projects. (CVS is built on top of RCS, and CVS has wide recognition. CVS is fairly good, but doesn't get you the performance or reliability that Perforce will.)

Are there things about Perforce I'd like to see changed? Sure. (It doesn't handle the case (upper/lower) between NT/Unix filenames very nicely, and there's no great GUI - although I personally don't care about GUIs, many folks do.)

But there are *so* many things it does right, things that I just can't live without: fairly easy automation of tasks without having to drop into some archane scripting language that's only on one platform (e.g. MS Visual Basic for VSS scripting); good performance; transparent handling of text files across a heterogenous development environment; honest-to-god provisions for backups of the SCM server; storing my file revision contents in a form that I can get to if I decide to change to another SCM system; easy (and mostly transparent) support of heterogenous development environments; no "hidden costs" so that when I purchase the software for $600/seat, I've written my first and last check for SCM needs.

Each thing in the above list is something that it's reasonable to expect from ANY source system - there are no Perforce-specific items on the above list. (That would be cheating.) So it makes it possible to point at ClearCase and say "why the heck can't I get to my file revisions, in an emergency, except through ClearCase database tools?" and to point at SourceSafe and say "you mean I have to program in C++ or Visual Basic to automate making a label or retrieving something?".

Sure, there are a wealth of "Perforce-specific" features I like a lot, and a couple I don't think I'd want to live without. ("Atomic submission of all files in a changelist" is an example.) Every SCM system has a couple of things like this.

But if you're truly trying to compare apples to apples, you wanna start in the intersection of the feature sets of the two systems you're comparing. Be sure to look at the hidden costs: staff-time, server configuration, etc. (ClearCase has such substantial hidden costs that it's been thrown out of nearly as many companies as I've seen it adopted into - just takes a little while for the bean-counters to figure out what happened.)

I feel confident that Perforce will do well in a fair comparison.

-Jeff Bowles

From: Davids Sarma <Davids.Sarma at telecom.lt>