# Perforce in FreeBSD Development

### Scott Long

`<scottl@FreeBSD.org>`

$FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/p4-primer/article.sgml,v 1.12 2010/05/03 21:04:08 rene Exp $

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# 1 Introduction

The FreeBSD project uses the Perforce version control system to manage experimental projects that are not ready for the main CVS repository.

## 1.1 Availability, Documentation, and Resources

While Perforce is a commercial product, the client software for interacting with the server is freely available from Perforce. It can be easily installed on FreeBSD via the `devel/p4` port or can be downloaded from the Perforce web site at http://www.perforce.com/perforce/loadprog.html, which also offers client applications for other OS's.

While there is a GUI client available, most people use the command line application called `p4`. This document is written from the point of view of using this command.

Detailed documentation is available online at http://www.perforce.com/perforce/technical.html.

Reading the Perforce User's Guide and Perforce Command Reference is highly recommended. The p4 application also contains an extensive amount of online help accessible via the `p4 help` command.

The FreeBSD Perforce server is hosted on `perforce.freebsd.org`, port `1666`. The repository is browsable online at http://perforce.freebsd.org. Some portions of the repository are also automatically exported to a number of CVSup servers.

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