Eclipse and Perforce do not mix

Spent last 2 weeks fighting with the perforce eclipse plug-in (war is not over, I even submitted an enhancement request to support .p4ignore). I wish I knew how poor perforce works with eclipse, I would have fought again it. As a source control it works fine as long as you use their GUI tool, but subversion it is not.

I have used a lot of source control software in my life: CVS, subversion, ClearCase, SourceSafe, Mercurial, Git, perforce and few others for short time.

My favorite has to be subversion. In 7 years of using subversion for my personal development, I have never had any problems. It works from command line, with windows explorer, with eclipse, with visual studio... it just works as you expect it, no fuss, no config woes. Just point it to a URL and you are done.

I want to preface this by saying that eclipse is an excellent IDE, the eclipse plug-in which is not associated with eclipse at all, and is written by perforce team.

Some things with perforce that I find unacceptable for commercial software:
- No ignore file (this is the first source control software that I found that doesn't have ignore), there are times you need to mark a local file so that it is not added to source control (mostly config files that have been customized for the local environment). Eclipse plug-in allows you to create .p4ignore but their GUI tool does not support it.
- Eclipse integration is shameful. There seems to be non-transactional nature to the plug-in, so when a problem is encountered you never know what state the file is in and even worse some problems fail silently. Login issue is the main cause, after the login expires eclipse plug-in starts silently failing unless you restart it; so now I close my eclipse before I go home and open it again when I get into work (annoying).
- Weird states created by eclipse plug-in, if the file is in read-write state due to an error, you are now in an odd state when you can't merge with latest, can't checkout and can only revert to the latest (while backing up your file) then using BeyondCompare (which is an awesome tool) to merge your changes in.
- Use of RO flag for management of check-ins, it feels like its 1995 and SourceSafe again, this flag can get clobbered by some editors or eclipse plug-in when checkout fails.

UPDATE: It has been a year and Perforce managed to fix many of the quirks and works a lot better with Eclipse now, in November of 2010.

Version 1.7.0.0 ready for prime time!

Lots of evening and weekends spent on getting more stuff in. Most of the changes are internal but I did add a nice visual admin site viewer using jQuery plugins.

After battling windows service code I finally got it working well enough that I feel comfortable using it instead of the console mode. It did take a while to figure out all the little kinks that arise when writing services and having to deal with Microsoft's security system (it's like trying to play Spelunker, read the Gameplay section).

I also decided to organize the entire website into the _website folder which makes getting up and running trivial (not that it was hard before, just now everything is under one folder and you can switch website roots easily which not having to copy config or resources). Something that people that run multiple instances have requested.