Question

I’ve dug through the interwebs all I can, and I can’t for the lack of me find any way of easily stashing or branching locally with perforce.
I know of the git wrapper for perforce, but it really doesn’t seem too well developed or reliable from everything I’ve read about it.

Answer 1

Regarding branching, I doubt you can “branch” locally in Perforce, nor could you natively stash.

• Git is based on a graph of commits (a DAG – Directed Acyclic Graph actually), which will display only the content of a commit (trees and blobs)
• Perforce is a linear VCS, based on composition of selection rules (it will compose what to display based on local selection rules)

Regarding branching:

• A branch in Git is just a light-weight and local alias to a head[*] / tip commit.
• A branch in Perforce is:
  • a codeline (most likely meaning when used as a noun)
  • a branch view specification (as in the entity created by “p4 branch” command – also a noun) – these are talked about below
  • when used as a verb (“to branch”) it means to use the “p4 integrate” command to create a new codeline (or branch!) of one or more files

As mentioned in this introduction to perforce branching, Perforce, being heavily linked to its central depo, need to create the relevant metadata for each files to create a branch.
Git would only write some bits to register the creation of a new branch!

[*] git branches are stored in the .git/refs/heads/ subdirectory