[p4] How does Bitkeeper compare to Perforce?

[Fabien Niñoles]

>
> > Of interest to me is the growth of open source distributed tools
> > (Darcs/Mercurial/Bazaar/Git) and their usage, but I am not really
> > sure about their applicability in many corporate environments.
>
> SVK is yet another option, but I haven't had much luck with it yet.


I used SVK in a corporate environment.  Since it's almost the same as having
a central server with simply a very flexible client, it goes as great as
using Subversion itself, with the advantage of having private branch for
free, as well as a nice smerge integration (which track the last revision
you merge a branch - which is a simplification of the full version tracking
that Perforce offers).

DSCM is really great for implementing the Private Repository Pattern from
Berczuk & al.  and it's often used this way in diverse projects using svn
(that's explain the popularity of scripts like *-import-svn and alike).  In
this way, you can used it in multiple environment with no trouble (well, I
even used SVN itself to do this kind of stuff with Perforce... it just
doesn't scale well enough when the change isn't locate to a minimal subtree
of our client workspace).  Using DSCM in a distributed fashion ask however
for a complete reevaluation of the work process and can only be done, IMHO,
in a trust environment (either is it because your trust completely your
developers or you don't care about what other people do to the tree, as long
as you control the main tree, like happen with the linux kernel).