Perforce for a Subversion user?

Question

I've just changed jobs. My previous employer uses Subversion, my new employer uses Perforce.

Are there any resources out there that'll help me, as a user, change my mental model from a Subversion one to a Perforce one? What are the analogs to common SVN commands? Which concepts are implemented differently?

I'm not particularly interested in the pros and cons of Perforce vs Subversion - the decision's been made. There are plenty of other questions on S.O. covering that. I'd like to know what mental readjustment I'll have to make (or not).

Answer 1

Perforce and Subversion are quite similar, they both feature atomic commit of groups of files, and path-based branching.

Perforce has:

a) Pending changesets - you can group files that you are editing into groups and manipulate the groups.

b) Client-Specs - you can map the repository to your local work-space in quite complicated schemes.

c) No external - so you can't map the same part of the repository to multiple locations in your work-space, or map other repositories to sub-dirs in your work-space.

d) Merge-tracking, which is a new feature for Subversion.

e) Strong server connections: You have to tell the server before editing a file, and the server uses this information to keep a good idea of your local work-space state, which makes updates faster.

Answer 2

A few things come to mind (I have used perforce four years ago - things may have changed).

• locking - perforce requires you get a lock on files you are working on. Subversion doesn't.
• changelist - changelists are basic to working with perforce. Every commit is of a changelist. They are less important in subversion.

This blog post may help you make the transition.