We have used Perforce for a group of up to 75 developers, 30000+ files, across 3 geographic sites. Currently we do about a 1000 changes a year on 6 inter-related products. I can attest that it is very robust and is the best product we tried across a WAN. We have been very happy with it, especially since it was fairly affordable (compared to things like ClearCase and Continuus).

Perforce concentrates on doing one thing well - tracking of software changes. It is not intended to be a work tracking system, which some of the more expensive products provide. It does not provide a GUI (although, why would you ever want to leave emacs anyway?). We use it integrated with our own web-based work management system and did not have to adapt our practices to it. The merge capability is excellent.

It's weakness are tolerable and somewhat unobvious. We felt it important to be able to compare changes in aggregate releases for debugging and reporting purposes. We found no products that do this well. The bookkeeping for this is a little tedious in Perforce and somewhat prone to misreporting old changes from deleted files. The form-based interface can also be a little confusing for things like branching - I see no reason why this could not be simplified.

In looking at configuration management, I think you have to concentrate on some of the basic principals:

like always knowing what you have

like being able to monitor changes in the software

like the tool being an aide to getting work done, not a barrier

like the tool supporting your change process, not imposing it's own

It is very difficult to evaluate some these products (mainly due to pushy sales people). Perforce was easy to evaluate and worked well for us. Putting in Perforce (migrating from CVS) was easy. Don't be fooled by a fancy GUI.

I agree with you. It's that way down here in Stafford too. DSL is shitty down here, and the cable service (Adelphia)is mediocre at best. As far as fining the companies, that doesn't do shit. I remember reading somewhere that Verizon incorporates fines into their operating costs. It's more profitable for them to pay the fines then to correct the violation. That sickens me. I'm not normally for government regulation of anything, but I would definitely agree that government regulation is in order here (NOT Tauzin-Dingell). If someone were to propose a bill that regulated the companies and didn't dick over the end user, I'd be all for it. Just my .02