Perforce Anti-Patterns | Perforce:
'via Blog this'
While I agree with encouraging use of things other than labels (changesets, automatic labels, brancghes can all be equivalent for labels)
I think that calling this an anti-pattern is specious.
There are anti-patterns that are fundamentally bad.
But there are also anti-patterns that are bad just because of a poor implementation - and apparently Perforce's implementation of labels is poor.
Conceptually, a changeset is very much like a label - a set of files and versions, with comment metadata. (Again, using the "files at the bottom" mindset, which I don't like, but which I find easier to think about.)
Similarly, a branch is very much like a label - or, rather, the place on a parent where a branch starts.
These are similar conceptually, and probably should be interconvertible.
It is foolish to create a rather heavyweight concept like a branch, a contour, will do.
Perforce;'s slowness probably arises because it has a table that looks like
filename : version : branch-name
which grows as #Files*#Labels.
Even worse if the metadata is stored RCS like, replicated per-file. I can't imagine Perforce being that silly ... now ... although I suspect they may have been historically.