Perforce
| Perforce | |
|---|---|
| Basic data
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| developer | Perforce Software Inc. |
| Publishing year | 1995 |
| Current version | 2017.2 (October 24, 2017) |
| operating system | GNU / Linux , Windows , macOS |
| programming language | C. |
| category | Version management |
| License | Proprietary |
| German speaking | Yes |
| http://www.perforce.com | |
Perforce is software for versioning files and directories.
architecture
Perforce supports copy-modify-merge - concept . However , it is also possible to work with the lock-modify-write approach. In addition to the usual management of files, which happens locally in defined workspaces, Perforce also contains the following object types: Labels (for marking certain revision levels of the versioned files), Branch Views (definitions of branch connections), Jobs (similar to tickets a bug tracker system).
Perforce is implemented as a client-server architecture . The server application manages a database with the metadata about the versioned files, including editing comments, version numbers and the relationships between the versions. The files themselves are stored separately as RCS deltas in the server's file system. The server is offered for several operating systems.
The client, which is available for various operating systems, including GNU / Linux , Windows and macOS , communicates with the server via TCP / IP. There are various GUI variants for the command line-based client (called P4), which make the usual user tasks such as checking out, checking in and comparing versions very easy. There are also interfaces to scripting languages such as Perl or Ruby.
Perforce versions each file individually, but manages so-called changelists , which are given global sequence numbers for the repository. With every check-in action, a changelist consisting of any number of individual actions on files (e.g. change, add, delete) is committed . The version history of a folder in the repository shows these global change lists, which means that the entire folder structure can be restored to a specific point in time at any time.
Licensing
Since January 2012, a version of the Perforce server has been freely available for a maximum of twenty users (with a maximum of twenty working copies) - previously the limit was two users. Alternatively, a Perforce server can be used freely with an unlimited number of users, but with a total of 1000 files. Perforce is also freely available for open source projects, school projects and for testing purposes. Otherwise commercial use is chargeable. All clients are freely available and can be installed on any number of systems.
distribution
In January 2010, 5,000 organizations had licensed more than 320,000 users.