I cut my teeth on RCS and then CVS, finally moving to Subversion (I've also used Visual Source Safe at work, and let me tell you, its bad reputation is richly deserved). Lately I've been using Perforce for OffByZero work and I've been reasonably impressed - despite the setup being a bit old-school (manually setting environment variables in this day and age?) it's very fast, stable and feature rich.

However, one thing it doesn't do well is work offline. There is no easy way of telling Perforce that you're disconnecting from the server, but that you still want to open files for editing. There are a number of hacks you can perform to do this, and some convoluted manual steps documented in the Perforce knowledgebase, but no clean way of doing it. Other bloggers have complained about this as well but I'm not so sure you can easily combine the blistering speed of Perforce with the ease of offline use of Subversion.

Anyhow, tomorrow night I'm going to have a bash (pun intended) at automating the steps in the Perforce KB with a script ... Ruby to the rescue :-)