Promising to improve the experiences of developers, release managers, and administrators when using the Git distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) system, Perforce Software has announced the availability of Perforce Git Fusion.

Perforce explains that developers who currently use Git can continue to use their preferred tools, but now also get hold of new capabilities for customization, reuse, and sharing of their projects. Essentially, Git Fusion is intended to extend Perforce's enterprise version management capabilities to Git repositories.

The company uses a litany of descriptive expressions to perhaps over-emphasize the usefulness and function of distributed version control systems: defensibility, scalability, compliance, visibility, quality, security, traceability, and accountability all feature as highlighted terms, to name but eight.

In Perforce's vision of the distributed version management environment, each developer site can have the full set of data, even if the logical and geographical structures of the project don't line up. The company says that this development comes in answer to the "fact" that using Git can pose challenges for projects that don't fit neatly into a single Git repository. Often companies are made to choose between changing their release processes and codebase to accommodate for the "limitations of Git" (as Perforce sees it), or making Git developers adopt bolted-on tools and add unwanted manual steps to their work.

Git Fusion also introduces Repository Remapping for developers to create new Git repositories with a reconfigured set of data. They can use elements from multiple repositories to push customized Git repositories together. They can also reuse the various elements of a Git repo — the commits, the trees, the file content — in a form that works in both new Git repositories and Perforce repositories.

Developers can code in either Git or Perforce and can switch easily back and forth. From the Git user experience, Perforce can be completely hidden or developers can choose to use Perforce's own suite of tools. This includes access to integrations with other applications, the ability to remap code on a grand scale, and tools to visualize the evolution of a file as well as branch history.

With Git Fusion, Developers Can

• Create customized repositories, selecting elements and modules from different repositories
• Action code sharing/reuse
• Collaborate with other teams and projects
• Use Perforce tools, such as Time Lapse View and Revision Graph
• Prevent modifications to sensitive files

"We have always been committed to supporting developers in whatever environment they prefer — it's a core tenet of our 'version everything' vision," said Perforce founder and CEO Christopher Seiwald. "With Git Fusion, we've not only made it easier for our customers to apply enterprise version management across all their projects, we've actually made the Git experience much more useful and productive. Developers who like Git can carry on unhindered, but they can also take advantage of our advanced capabilities when they need to. Git Fusion keeps teams agile and allows them to easily scale up for complex projects, while also letting system administrators rest assured their IP is guarded by the Perforce versioning engine."