Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Eric Schabell <eschabell AT sourcemage.org>]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 05:23:26PM +0200, Maurizio Boriani wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
>    why use perforce (a proprietary software) for code versioning instead of
> arch or cvs? Which advantages are there in using it (I never used it 
> before)?
> 
> For what readed on www.perforce.com it doesn't seems to haa something 
> special 
> better than others... instead, for less, it isn't free. Why not switch to 
> something else?
> 
Well, for starters you can imagine that we have several thousand spells,
large amounts of which are moved, renamed or deleted at one time or
another... that was my original push to use perforce (as previous
Grimoire Lead). 

It all started on savannah (cvs) which were rather bad a fixing locked
file problems... then some members of the developement team hosted our
project on cvs (see comments above), worked pretty good for sorcery code
but still headache for grimories. Problem was that developers left and
dropped cvs support, so we eventually ended up by the good people of
perforce for free. 

In the mean time, as project lead various members of the team would
complain that cvs should be used (or whatever flavor of CMS they found
to be the solution). I took the trouble to find a sponsor, arrange the
cvs hosting and a grand total of about 5 people ever got accounts on the
box (it is still avail btw... for those that want to bomb sandall about
why we are still not on <fill in your favorite CMS>). Seems the tried
and trustworthy perforce repo has held out rather fine over the last 2
-2 1/2 years. 

They do support free software, have contributed projects before to free
software (see Jam on their website among others...) and host several
projects for nothing. It is a very simple to use, file based CMS that
leave no cruft on your system.

The bottom line is that we should really concentrate on fixing the
software instead of messing around (for the how many times is it now)
with our tools. But hey, that is just my little 'ol opinion...

PS. Don't take this the wrong way, I don't want to be harsh or anything
but you might want to do an advanced goolge search on the words cvs and
repo with only domain as our sourcemage lists and see the previous
discussions that argue various forms of the same listed here. ;-)

erics
-- 
Eric D. Schabell M.Sc. - Developer - http://www.sourcemage.org
irc: irc.freenode.net (#sourcemage), nick -> erics

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