perforce is only like $900 a seat! 

Perforce is free for 2 or fewer users. 

it's a tortoisesvn problem. You can always use another client or the command line tools. 

A lot of narcotics are marketed similarly. 

"A lot of narcotics are marketed similarly."

I fail to see the issue. A guy at home can use Perforce all he wants for free and then he can upsell his company on it when he learns how great it is.

Comparing it to drug dealers is disingenuous at best. Are all indie developers drug dealers too for offering free demos? At least Perforce doesn't limit you to an hour of use before being locked out. 

because he has to used the shared user account rather than his own.

"2 or fewer uses = free" is all and great until you have 13 people 

I did not know that about P4...I might have to get a copy. There's been a few times where I thought setting up a server at home would be handy for certain creative endeavors. It's much better than AlienBrain or any of the open source solutions.

*opens Lunaran for edit* 

I use SVN for my home stuff... works well enough for what I need. 

to be more specific, i use tortoise as the client. no massive performance problems, but I also have less than a thousand files under version control. On the other hand, maybe it's slow and I just don't notice. 

""2 or fewer uses = free" is all and great until you have 13 people"

Yes? At that point you need to buy a real license. It's not complicated. Perforce kicks the living crap out of stuff like SVN. It's worth it if you've got the scratch.

If you insist on free - well, you get what you pay for. 

What makes Perforce so much better than SVN? The tools? Or is it fundamentally different from how SVN works somehow? 

Have you used it? That would explain everything. :)

It's got a nice user interface, it automatically handles file merging, it allows multiple people to check files out and merges their changes together seamlessly, etc.

SVN seems like it does the bare minimum where Perforce goes the extra mile.

SVN is fine and since it's free it's hard to complain really. Especially on Mac where it seems to be the only choice for some reason. 

svn does automatic file merging as long as it's possible to figure out what to do. svn does everything i desire from a vcs. UI isn't one of the things, i use the svn cmdline all the time, because it's so much clearer and easier to use than graphical uis. 

"i use the svn cmdline all the time, because it's so much clearer and easier to use than graphical uis."

LOL 

That stuff you mention about Perforce sounds a bit like Git or Mercurial to me.

I recently started using svn for my quaddicted stuff, it's super handy and more than enough for me. Using kdesvn as gui tool because I am lazy.
Commandline is nice and easy too. 

Guys, command line is never nice and easy. It's 2008, FFS. I was done with command line tools once I moved off of DOS (except for compilng Quake maps where I had no choice).

At any rate, I'm not saying SVN doesn't work. It obviously does. But Perforce is superior. 

I love it. It's probably one of the major reasons why I love Linux so much. I like being able to save a "line of command" and re-use it later to get the same result as earlier. Or use it for batch processing. Or to easily launch a certain quake map or mod (though I would love to have a nice frontend for that...).
Again a matter of preference and personal taste. 

Richt click on the shortcut to Fitzquake and type it there. Still need a mouse!!! But hey, I'm gonna need a mouse anyway right?

Y'know when they play tennis and someone serves an ace at like 150Mph or something.

Well someone should mod Quake so that when you press:

`quit

it times the amount of time it takes to do it in milliseconds, and then writes it on the screen. "Exit" should be quit.

Then we could have a "quit-off". And send demos. "Who's the fastest quitter thread". 

... what? 

I haven't finished a project in years 

Apart from the nice GUI, SVN has all of what you mentioned above. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, I'm just saying that most of the complaints you have seem to be because of lacking tool support. I agree that this is a huge problem with Subversion. The recent Mac clients I mentioned earlier have improved the situation somewhat, but they're still far from optimal. The only decent SVN client I know is the Subclipse plugin for the Eclipse IDE with its Synchronize View.

Obvsiously, the command line allows you to do everything, and I sometimes use it as well, but it's just not convenient. I don't know how one should remember all those options and switches that the svn command understands... I certainly can't. 

I've been using "Versions" and it seems be pretty good. 

sudden honor-driven defense of demo-driven sales methods

smiling is when the corners of your mouth go up and you feel amused 

Oh you were joking. OK then. 

Try Cornerstone - I find it to be better.

http://www.zennaware.com/cornerstone/