[p4] Perfarce [sic] experiences

[Johan Nilsson]

Matt Janulewicz wrote:
> I'm not sure I grasp the advantage of using two source control tools
> at once. Mercurial (distributed) and Perforce (centralized) are
> apples and oranges. Pick a tool that best suits your team and
> project.

The advantage for me is not in the distributed nature of Mercurial (I don't 
even use it as such).

The main point for me was that through the usage of Mercurial and its 
Perfarce plugin it seems possible to work disconnected in a controlled way 
(small and frequent check-ins of working portions of code) while still 
having Perforce as the centralized, shared, repository while online.

> Mercurial, by nature, is completely offline unless you are syncing
> your changes to another repo or replicating one locally to work on.
> We're talking about two differest beasts.

Yes.

>
> BTW, shelving is tremendously convenient for code reviews. Granted,
> shelves are public (or more correctly they are as public as the
> protections table allows the shelved files to be) but they have the
> advantage of not actually being submitted to a depot.

This's a bit off-topic. Shelving doesn't make it any easier to work 
disconnected, IIUC.

>
> I don't think that shelving and this new offline approach in Perforce
> are designed to make Perforce act like a distributed source control
> system, though it does somewhat mimic some of the useful attributes
> of them.

Neither do I think that Perforce moves towards a DVCS model (but who could 
tell). I just found some useful properties of the combination of the two 
tools.

Regards,
Johan