Perforce Source Control Integration
Spent one intermittent day on a source control solution. Had to be free and fully integrated with dotNET which left two options I knew about: Perforce and SourceSafe.
I had confidence in the quality of Perforce but was/am concerned about its integration with web projects. Specifically, it can’t checkin files unless they appear (in active use by VS) within the subtree anchored by P4ROOT. This leads to the root being “c:\” so that it captures both “c:\inetpub” and my normal development folders under “c:\tone”. I suspect this may get ugly when/if branches are needed. I have half a hope that client specs can be used to help.
Not a complete solution yet. Can’t checkin web projects that aren’t rooted on “http://localhost”.
Perforce uninstall works quickly and leaves the database and depot files behind.
Perforce install grabs the value of P4ROOT from the environment and removes the variable. It becomes the depot root and the suggested location for the server installation, which can be changed manually during installation without affecting the depot root. A bit weird. I’m probably missing something.
Because of the “c:\” depot root inflexibility, I backed out of Perforce a few times.
Trying Visual Source Safe 6.0c rapidly brought back all the bad memories associated with it. Bad interface. Cryptic database. Puzzling semantics.
Let’s hope for the best.
On the plus side, I can now use Perforce to version any file on my hard disk!