From Perforce to Git

   I'm trying to make a comprehensive comparison of Perforce and Git
features. There are two things I currently can't find:

1) "Who's editing what"
    It's been documented that git can help developers communicate who
is editing what at any given time like perforce. (assuming there is a
central repositry) Has anyone seen an example of scripts to do this?
    References:
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/ch07.html  (Who's
editing what)
  "To view "pending" changes a la P4 C<git cherry> or C<git log> can be used on
  someone else's branch, but their changes must be published."
     - http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2008/09/msg139661.html

2) Symlinks to checkout partial repository
   I believe I read symlinks could be used to checkout part of a
repository. Is this true? any references? I imagine submodules is the
preferred way of doing this, and "narrow" or "partial" or "sparse"
checkouts are under development
(http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2008/9/14/3292714), but I'm
still interested in learning this solution.

any direction would be appreciated, -brandon