its been a long time…  i haven’t made a public update to the zoo tools in a long time, nor have i touched this page in forever.  i can’t say thats going to change, but i can say i’m going to try and do /something/. so what better way to start doing something than to start a gripe about something…

and it happens to be perforce.  my only professional experience with SCM is via perforce.  sure i’ve used svn and bzr for my personal stuff, but i have no idea how they perform in production.  my guess is svn would do badly at a game studio, and possibly bzr would too. but man, how much of a piece of junk is perforce.  i mean svn and bzr at least have the excuse (if indeed they’re bad – which i don’t know) that they’re free pieces of software.  but perforce?  its pricey.  like per-license type pricey.

i mean their ui is terrible, they have no useful features like “shelving” changelists, its super difficult/expensive to move where your data is stored (as a user) should you start getting low on disk space (we version control some super big ass files). and then there are the sync issues.  ”gee,  perforce /says/ I have this file, but I don’t really *know* whether I do until I force sync it because perforce doesn’t seem to do any sort of check to see if the file on my disk actually matches the file in its database…  so the first point of call for any problem is force syncing entire parts of one’s project tree which seems super ludicrous.

sure, most of the time its probably user error – but thats not the bloody point.  i mean when you have heaps of users from heaps of different disciplines all trying to get something working, there is bound to be heaps of user error, and the “supposed” version control system doesn’t help a bit.  how come the software can’t tell me if the files on my machine aren’t the same as the files on the server?  like, isn’t that the goddamn point?  f-ing stupid.

all i can say is perforce is damn lucky the cost of switching systems is really high…