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I'm surprised to see Perforce on there.

vvanders 11y ago
You shouldn't be, it's the de-facto source control for games and interactive content. Git/Mercurial/etc don't provide the strong locking mechanisms needed to deal with binary files. Combine that with the fact that Git falls over at ~5GB. When I was in games we'd regularly have repos > 30GB for a code sync or > 150GB for art sync. Perforce would pull down that art sync in 10 minutes, good luck doing that with Git, not to mention that they support Proxies that handle caching of large changesets automatically for remote teams.
- bch 11y ago
  > Combine that with the fact that Git falls over at ~5GB. I've never heard that (and certainly don't personally deal w/ git repos that large). I thought massive repository handling was supposed to be a strength of git. How does git (start) failing at that scale ?
  - knicholes 11y ago
    git LFS comes to mind. https://git-lfs.github.com/ https://git-lfs.github.com/
  - vernie 11y ago
    If you commit a large binary file and iterate on it a bunch you'll notice that your repo size explodes. That's why there have been multiple efforts (e.g. git-annex, Git Large File Storage) to improve performance with large binary files (by essentially taking the files out of the repo).
  - chubot 11y ago
    Big companies have issues with Git... here is an old thread that talks about what happened with Facebook and Git: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/189776 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/18977... So they are patching Mercurial, apparently with some Google collaboration (!) https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...
- chubot 11y ago
  Yeah, I was using Perforce in the 2002-2004 time frame in the game industry. I'm sort of surprised to see it still the leader after all these years -- but, on the other hand, it's pretty hard to write a good VCS. It's probably less work than writing a relational database, but not by a lot. I know Perforce is making a killing off of this market. People here are always asking for startup opportunities... so I would suggest collaboration on large binary files for artists. Not that I really know what strategy to take, but I smell something funny when one company has dominated a niche for over a decade. If you want to be glib you can call it Github for artists :) I guess they do use Dropbox for collaboration already though.
  - vvanders 11y ago
    Yeah, I'd love to play around with Git Fusion sometime to see how it plays with binary workflows. Could be a nice way to bridge teams that aren't Perforce friendly.
hobs 11y ago
I was told that all of google's code is one big perforce repo.

You shouldn't be, it's the de-facto source control for games and interactive content. Git/Mercurial/etc don't provide the strong locking mechanisms needed to deal with binary files. Combine that with the fact that Git falls over at ~5GB. When I was in games we'd regularly have repos > 30GB for a code sync or > 150GB for art sync. Perforce would pull down that art sync in 10 minutes, good luck doing that with Git, not to mention that they support Proxies that handle caching of large changesets automatically for remote teams.

bch 11y ago
> Combine that with the fact that Git falls over at ~5GB. I've never heard that (and certainly don't personally deal w/ git repos that large). I thought massive repository handling was supposed to be a strength of git. How does git (start) failing at that scale ?
- knicholes 11y ago
  git LFS comes to mind. https://git-lfs.github.com/ https://git-lfs.github.com/
- vernie 11y ago
  If you commit a large binary file and iterate on it a bunch you'll notice that your repo size explodes. That's why there have been multiple efforts (e.g. git-annex, Git Large File Storage) to improve performance with large binary files (by essentially taking the files out of the repo).
- chubot 11y ago
  Big companies have issues with Git... here is an old thread that talks about what happened with Facebook and Git: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/189776 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/18977... So they are patching Mercurial, apparently with some Google collaboration (!) https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...
chubot 11y ago
Yeah, I was using Perforce in the 2002-2004 time frame in the game industry. I'm sort of surprised to see it still the leader after all these years -- but, on the other hand, it's pretty hard to write a good VCS. It's probably less work than writing a relational database, but not by a lot. I know Perforce is making a killing off of this market. People here are always asking for startup opportunities... so I would suggest collaboration on large binary files for artists. Not that I really know what strategy to take, but I smell something funny when one company has dominated a niche for over a decade. If you want to be glib you can call it Github for artists :) I guess they do use Dropbox for collaboration already though.
- vvanders 11y ago
  Yeah, I'd love to play around with Git Fusion sometime to see how it plays with binary workflows. Could be a nice way to bridge teams that aren't Perforce friendly.

hobs 11y ago

I was told that all of google's code is one big perforce repo.