Re: Public Access to Perforce?

David O'Brien wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 29, 2004 at 03:49:45PM -0700, Tim Kientzle wrote:
> 
>>>Ask Perforce to port to 64-bit AMD64.  That would allow them to have a
>>>lot more memory for their in-memory operations.
>>
>>Another possibility would be to switch from Perforce
>>to something like SVN.
>>
>>I'm not sure how it compares to Perforce,
> 
> 
> It is amazing the number of people that keep suggesting things like this
> and yet don't compare the two things they suggest to know how they really
> compare.  For what the project uses Perforce for, SVN would offer
> nothing.
> 
I can't really say much about this as I don't really know much about 
Perforce at all.
> 
>>but
>>SVN has much better branch and merge support
>>than CVS does.  
> 
> 
> Oh?  SVN's own developers say "Currently, Subversion's merge support is
> essentially the same as CVS's."
> 
Yes, the merge support is pretty much the same in the sense that 
Subversion does not specifically help with it but because a revision 
covers the entire repository it is much easier to actually track and 
perform the merges even though currently you still have to do so manually.
> 
>>It's also specifically designed
>>for use over slow networks, which would be a real
>>plus.
> 
> 
> SVN does nothing better than Perforce, yet removes the advantages of CVS.
> SVN doesn't remember past merges, so its branching is still embryonic
> compared to Perforce.  

I don't know enough to say anything about this either.

> Compared to CVS, SVN requires a connection to the
> main repo, and uses a heavier-weight network transport (requires Apache
> and HTTP-based WebDAV/DeltaV protocol).

I believe when you say SVN requires a connection to the main repo you 
are referring to the fact the a BDB style subversion repo is not as 
easily mirrored as a CVS repo, which is the case.  However in Subversion 
1.1, which is coming out soon, there is an FSFS backend which will be 
much easier to mirror.  Subversion does NOT require Apache or 
WebDAV/DeltaV at all.  Subversion does use the APR (Apache Portable 
Runtime) which is what Apache is built on because it provides a 
convenient cross platform library (? can't think of the correct term 
right now).  Also if you don't want to use Apache and WebDAV the is an 
svnserve server which uses a custom protocol to connect to a SVN server 
so there is no HTTP or WebDAV overhead.

Just trying to clear a few things up,
Jonathan

P.S. I'm not really even much of a subversion user but I follow the -dev 
list closely because I consider it an example of a very well run project 
and enjoy reading about how it is being worked on and what is being 
tried to make it better and some of things stated previously are common 
misconceptions.