Perforce did not suck

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

I've noticed that a lot of people in the open source world have a negative opinion of Perforce, whether they've used it or not. Here is one recent example:

There's also Perforce, which I don't know much about, but I gather it's a crappy proprietary centralised VCS which is worse than Subversion in pretty much every way.

This kind of offhand dismissal by people who are not familiar with Perforce is very common. When we were switching from Perforce to git for the Perl 5 source code, a lot of people assumed we wanted to do it because Perforce wasn't good enough (but it was really because the open source licensing procedure was non-trivial, and the lack of anonymous repository access was seen as inhibiting contributors; there were also objections to depending on a free-but-not-Free program).

There are other people who have used Perforce and not liked something about it. Their opinions range from reasoned critiques to poisonous rants:

[Dear Perforce… ] 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 used Perforce exclusively for many years, both for large projects with many other users and small personal projects, and my experience with it was very different. I loved Perforce. I found it refreshingly simple to learn, it worked fast and unsurprisingly and well, and it had excellent support and documentation (of the kind that few open source programs of any kind have, even now). I encountered only two or three minor bugs in it after several years of use, and I never once had to fix the repository (a welcome change from CVS).

There are, of course, many valid criticisms of Perforce, and my intention is not to defend it against those. I've suffered from some of its problems myself: its (mostly justifiable) dependence on the network was at odds with my very slow dialup link, p4p (the proxy) didn't work very well for me, some administrators I know had problems configuring their server the way they wanted, and so on. I switched to git myself a few years ago, and later helped other projects (Perl, Archiveopteryx) I cared about to move away from Perforce too. I haven't regretted the change.

But Perforce certainly did not suck, and there are some things I still miss about it. As non-distributed VCSes go, I think Perforce is vastly better than the (many) other programs I've used.