Perforce
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Perforce is a commercial proprietary Revision Control (RC) system. It is developed by Perforce Software, Inc. and was founded in 1995 by Christopher Seiwald. The Perforce system is based on a client/server model with the server managing the collection of source versions in one or more depots. The server software runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, or Microsoft Windows operating systems.
The client side provides graphical and command line tools for a large number of operating systems. Also available is a suite of plugins that integrate with various programming IDEs (Visual Studio, Codewright, etc.) and third party applications, such as Xcode, Autodesk 3D Studio Max, Alias Maya, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Eclipse, emacs.
Other features of the system include support for reporting (i.e. notifying users when a file has changed), branching and merging, database checkpoints, and defect tracking.
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[edit] Current users
Perforce is used by some 3,600 organizations world wide, including companies such as Cisco Systems, IBM, Bank of America, Electronic Arts, Pixar Studios, CCP Games, [1], NVIDIA, Yahoo, Macromedia, Google, Zoran, Symantec, SAP and Citrix Systems [2].
[edit] Scalability
Perforce is scalable, and generally performs well in large installations even on modest hardware. However, there are a few issues that can cause problems at large sites:
- User management, including groupings and permissions are administered through flat files that do not allow comments. User groupings and permissions (called protections in Perforce) can quickly become unwieldy without support from external tools or scripts.
