Which is easier to learn: AccuRev or Perforce?

Question

We are trying to decide between AccuRev or Perforce. We have a small team, and need something that is easy to learn. Which of these version control applications is easier to learn and more user friendly?

Answer 1

This question is a bit subjective!

That being said, there are many variables you need to consider: developer experience, what tool you are currently using, what your team can afford to buy etc.

If your main concern is simply figuring out what is easier, both vendors offer free trials/licenses. You should download them and test them out against your code base and existing tools.

Also - try to get your team involved to ease the transition.

Answer 2

I can't speak for AccuRev - honestly I haven't even heard of it before now - but I can speak for Perforce:

I find it incredibly easy once you understand a few truly key aspects:

• Anything that might change the "depot" (server side SCM managed repository) happens through changelists.
• All of those interactions on changelists are also tied to a client workspace - in other words, you can't really work with files that haven't had a mapping established from the depot to your filesystem.

Also, the three days of training in San Francisco (or perhaps a closer location) was well worth it for me as I have an administrative role in our Perforce environment - though I had been using it prior to the training just fine to manage our code base.

Answer 3

If you are still choosing you may want to read AccuRev - another story how to screw UI and Reply by AccuRev. As an AccuRev user, I think that idea of stream tree is really powerful and many of the features like time locks, promoting by transactions or issues, etc. are useful, but UI implementation is awful. You definitely need to play hard with it before switching.

Answer 4

Neither one is easy to learn. Perforce's weirdness is focused around branching and private work areas. AccuRev's weirdness is focused around streams, promoting between them, and reparenting them. Both systems are a little hard to get your head around, especially if you're used to CVS.

For my two cents, AccuRev is the better product. The streams are a very powerful tool for managing development vs. QA vs. patches. And the concept of server-shadowed private workspaces is a godsend - there is no reason for a user not to checkpoint their workspace several times a day, and it goes into your server backups.