I understand what you mean. It all depends on with whom you’ve been working. Whenever you work in a very small team, or on your own (in your garage?), well, undoubtedly, no need to be connected to a server, for sure.

However, this is not the case for all developers. Some of them have to work together, not being located in the very same desk or in the same country. It can become a real nightmare to find out someone has modified a lot of files just when you want to commit your changes (and maybe finding out then that your own modifications have already been done !). The sooner you have a clue someone’s making some changes on a file, the better it is , if you have to modify it too Unless you’re fond of the merge stuff …

Thus, I wouldn’t say PerForce is bad and SVN/CVS are better. It depends on how you work.

Anyway, nobody’s perfect. Neither are SCM tools ;-D

Caroline