Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 07:34:01PM +0100, Tony Smith wrote:
> On Monday 14 June 2004 20:47, Eric Schabell wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Thanks to those who've spoken up on our behalf. For what it's worth, we 
> have 5 
> or 6 boxes in the UK running SMGL now, and we're very happy with it. It's 
> worth noting that whilst the free license is provided by Perforce Software 
> Inc, the host machine is my own. From my personal point of view, I'm 
> helping 
> folks who are helping me and that seems very much in the spirit of free 
> software.
 
It is, and you really help us a lot with providing that service. It
should also be mentioned that at the time we started using perforce
subversion wasn't very advanced yet and no one had heard of arch. cvs
never did a very good job for the grimoire, so it was very nice to have
a system like perforce that handles it much better.
I also understand those that think we should use a Free Software version
control system, especially now that there are working systems (arch,
svn) that provide the features we need. I don't see us giving up
perforce anytime soon, but providing another system in addition to it
should happen eventually.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                              Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org