[p4] How does Bitkeeper compare to Perforce?

[Peter Stephenson]

Ken Williams wrote:
>> http://www.bitkeeper.com/Comparisons.Perforce.html
>
> That comparison is woefully misinformed.  It claims Perforce doesn't even
> have atomic changesets!
> 
> The spin on true facts is also pretty major...

I'll say.  Here's another comment (I agree with all the previous ones
I've seen).

"Merging in Perforce is primitive at best."

Number one: In practice, merging is more than just reconciling the
current state of two files; doing it properly involves resolving
previous merge history (as any CVS refugee with a head-shaped dent in
their desk will tell you).  Perforce has particularly good integration
records, so you only ever merge what you need to.  That's a colossal
advantage for complex merges.  Last time I looked (I could be out of
date... we're not looking for a replacement for Perforce) BitKeeper
didn't do anything similar.

Number two: the facts to which that rather limited opinion presumably
refers, i.e. (I'm guessing) the human-initiated process of aligning two
different files given a set of differences, isn't true any more either
now there are graphical utilities built into Perforce to do this.  It
never was true if you had the patience to set it up with an external
merge utility, so that "at best" was out of place even then.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws at csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


To access the latest news from CSR copy this link into a web browser:  http://www.csr.com/email_sig.php

To get further information regarding CSR, please visit our Investor Relations page at http://ir.csr.com/csr/about/overview