Dear Perforce:
Fuck you.
Fuck you, you miserable, untrustworthy, misleading, overpriced bastard. I hope your office goes up in flames along with all your off-site backups. I pray that some open source product that actually works is embraced by all the major companies and drives you out of business. I hope that no other company is duped by your salespeople into thinking you have something even remotely close in quality to the ancient and craptastic product known as CVS. Never before have I experienced so much pain in the most simplistic of version control tasks as I have since starting to work at a company that made the mistake of considering you.
I am in total agreement with Linus that CVS is evil and that anyone who chooses to use it knowing the alternatives is both “stupid and ugly”, but I would switch from Perforce to CVS in a heartbeat. I would bow down an kiss CVS’s authors feet if I could avoid ever using your self flagellation “tool” again.
I am currently the only one working in my codebase:
- Four times now I have come into work, started coding, and opened up a file that I edited, and submitted the day before only to find it’s at some prior version. Telling perforce to sync it just results in it telling me it *is* in sync. The end result is that i have to do a sync -f (which tells it to forcibly overwrite everything every morning or else risk screwing over my repo by editing and checking in a file that was rolled back without it telling me). No, unit tests don’t catch this problem because it will roll them back like anything else, and since i never intentionally check in failing code the test from before the mysterious rollback gives me a green bar just like the one after the rollback and it’s not like I memorize the number of tests I have in each project at the end of every day. Today it forced me to merge in “their” changes. Except I’m the only one working in the damn branch, and I’ve only got one “client” that refers to it.
- When you try and “integrate” (otherwise known as “merge”) files from folder A (where you’ve been working) into folder B it will tell you that “their” stuff has changes but “your” stuff is fine and would you like to accept “their” changes? You see “their” changes are the ones that YOU made in folder A and “your” changes are the ones (if any) from folder B that you weren’t screwing with and are trying to merge into.
- It changes the file permissions. It changes line endings. Yes there are preferences for both of these but there shouldn’t be. A version control system should never alter the files you put into it in any way. The command line tools are pure crap. If you want to do anything that isn’t trivial you essentially just have to use the GUI.
- It’s not smart enough to understand that a file that you’ve changed… wait for it…. is a file that you’ve changed!!! oh sure you can say “Please Mr. Perforce, I’d like to edit that file there please” and then it will know, but you can’t just edit a file. That’s crazy-talk in perforce land. If you try successive rollbacks of changesets it will start bitching about not wanting to clobber files that it just made writable when you did the last rollback even though you haven’t done anything but tell it to roll back a few times.
- It can’t scale. You want to put terabytes worth of data in it, it’ll let you, but if you dare try and request it you’ll either take down the box or prevent anyone else from being able to do anything on it.
- It alters file permissions in some 17th century attempt at “locking”. This is probably due to the fact that it can’t just tell that you’ve worked on a file. By making the files read only it forces you to tell it that you want to edit it, and thus enables it to know you’ve edited it. It will get confused and bitch about needing to submit files so you’ll tell it to submit but then there aren’t actually any files that need submitting so it creates a changeset with no files in it and then refuses to submit the changeset with no files in it. This changeset will then sit around mocking you until the sun explodes or you go and delete it…. delete the file that it told you you had to create and then refused to accept.
- It makes me waste hours every week fighting with it.
Pitchforks and vile thoughts,
-masukomi
[Update: Please note that I'm not just bitching about Perforce. No, I don't like it, but I've done something about it. I went and wrote a tool to sync perforce with various Distributed Version Control Systems, but then I came to the conclusion that Git was just too damn cool to bother with the other ones, and switched to using Git with it's git-p4 tool to sync to Satan, er, perforce. If you're interested in that it can be found in the contrib directory of the git source. Just copy it to somewhere in your path and you're good to go (requires Python).]
[Update 2] I’ve responded to the many comments about this that were left here, and on Reddit Programming in a new post.
