[p4] How does Bitkeeper compare to Perforce?

[Slava Imeshev]

Andrew,

> But going back to the term "atomic", and with my example where there
> are 2 dependent files, each one changed by a different user in a
> incompatible way.
> If both users submit the files at about the same time, and without
> having a sync in-between. This possible in Perforce (and sometimes even
> helpful), but this is where perforce fails to "atomically" catch these
> operations as being separate.
> You now have the head of the repo, with file1.c#2 and file2.c#2, that
> have never been built or tested together at those versions.
> Only file1.c#2 with file2.c#1, and file1.c#1 and file2.c#2 were ever
> tested by the developers.

You are talking about changes that are legitimate from the version control system (VCS) point of
view, but are incorrect semantically. Making sure that the changes are semantically correct is a
job of an engineer making changes, not a VCS. I don't think that there is a VCS that would provide
such validation, and I doubt it should. Perforce does its job as VCS, and does it extremely well.

With all this said, validating changes is trivially handled by a build management system that
watches Perforce for changes, launches the build when new changes arrive and reports build and
tests failures if any.

Regards,

Slava Imeshev
vimeshev at viewtier.com
www.viewtier.com
Parabuild - Build With Pleasure






> 
> 
> > I have lots of respect for the technical capabilities of BitKeeper,
> > but I do think that many corporations prefer to keep their assets
> > more controlled.
> 
> Yes it can be a bit scary to think a single disgruntle employee could
> walk out with an entire company source history on a single flash drive.
> 
> For the control of files, it may be better to think of the source
> control as any other set of networked files, on a common file server.
> It could be a local policy to force all the clones to be restricted to
> a common backed up file server, with ACL control and audit recording.
>  
> > 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.
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