We're also a small group (15 people) who have been using Visual SourceSafe and are switching to Perforce.

We actually really liked VSS. The GUI is very nicely done, the system is absurdly easy to learn and use, and it has some concepts I really liked that Perforce does not (specifically, "Sharing"). The problem with VSS is that it's a peer to peer system, and when you start getting over only a few users, it's unstable and prone to corruption, and it's very slow when you get over a certain number of files in a VSS directory. Also, the purists on this list will (and have) point out that VSS has no concept of atomic change sets - it keeps track of changes on a per-file basis, and getting back to a certain revision of the entire project is extremely difficult unless you've labeled the revision you're looking for.

We evaluated PVCS when we decided to switch away from VSS. PVCS has some of the same problems as VSS, and we found it difficult to setup and use. It's also a peer to peer system, and having been burned once, we decided against it.

The only other systems which fit our bill (we have both Mac and Windows developers, and share a LOT of code between them...) were CVS and Perforce.

CVS, while inexpensive, reminded us a lot of PVCS in it's problems. Also, it's UI was oriented towards viewing the workspace, not the database, and we prefer to view the database.

Perforce seemed to us to be the most robust package (the #1 selling point in our case), had a decent UI for Windows, supported the Mac, and did most of what we wanted. Switching over has been a pain in the neck because we're having to completely reorganize our VSS database and how we do things (mainly due to the lack of the "Sharing" feature I mentioned earlier - this is basically a symbolic link for files in the database which allows a file in the database to be referenced by more than one folder in the database -- changes to the file in one folder are seen immediately by the other folder because they're really the same file. Why Perforce doesn't offer this is beyond me, especially since their branching mechanism basically does the same thing until one of the branches changes...).

Still, Perforce has a lot to recommend it, once you understand the concepts. You can download it and try it out free, which is probably a good idea.

-->Steve Bennett

From: "Christophe MONJARET" <c.monjaret at eolring.fr> Date: Fri, 5 May 2000 17:59:53 +0200 To: <perforce-user at perforce.com> Subject: [p4] (no subject)

Hello,

We are a small developper's group working on PC / winNT with Visual C++, and we are interested by 'perforce' to manage our software. We are looking for comparison between 'perforce' and products like PVCS or Visual SourceSafe.

Thanks for your answers.

C. MONJARET Eolring International e-mail : c.monjaret at eolring.fr