5 ms·

Poor Perforce. Once upon a time it was a very useful and interesting product. For those of you who have only known a world of git, there was a time where a prod

• pluc 5y ago
  The only advantage Perforce has, and the reason why giants such as Ubisoft have committed to it, is that "it handles large files better". That's it.
  • hyperpl 5y ago
    It also offers granular ACLs where git doesn't.
  • lupire 5y ago
    Also has partial checkouts, important for huge repos.
    • erinnh 5y ago
      Ive done partial checkouts in Git before as well. Its called a "sparse checkout". https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-sparse-checkout https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-sparse-checkout
      • lupire 4y ago
        Yes, but (sorry for yelling, that's in the source) > THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. ITS BEHAVIOR, AND THE BEHAVIOR OF OTHER COMMANDS IN THE PRESENCE OF SPARSE-CHECKOUTS, WILL LIKELY CHANGE IN THE FUTURE.
  • maccard 5y ago
    > The only advantage Perforce has, Perforce is also ripping fast for updating/status checking, (run git status on the Unreal Engine repo to see the difference), is centralized (a feature, not a bug), has full support for partial and shallow checkouts. It also offers support for _running_ perforce, not just their hosted offering. > and the reason why giants such as Ubisoft have committed to it The reason companies like Ubisoft, Epic, etc use it is because it predates git. > is that "it handles large files better". That's it. Lets' not pretend that "better" is a good comparison. Until 5-6 years ago, git didn't handle large binary files at all. Even now, it's a "pick your poison".
    • heleninboodler 5y ago
      Did they ever get over the idea that a version control system should try to prevent two people from modifying (or "checking out") a file at the same time? That always drove me insane. Every time I got on a plane I'd have to do whatever trick that was that let me edit files even though I never told the server I was going to, and deal with the consequence later. I don't exactly remember the details or how bad the consequences were, but it always seemed ridiculous. Oh, and cloning a repo so you have a second copy of it for an experiment took ages because you couldn't just 'cp -a' the directory, you had to "enlist" in all the files with the server... I do not recall p4 fondly.
      • maccard 5y ago
        > Did they ever get over the idea that a version control system should try to prevent two people from modifying (or "checking out") a file at the same time? Checking out is still a fundamental concept of perforce, and it's the reason it's so fast. Not all files need exclusive locks, that's usually reserved for binary assets (and is a selling point of perforce as it prevents an unsolvable merge conflict later on). When I started using perforce 13 years ago, every editor I used had either a perforce plugin, or an option to "checkout on edit or save", > Oh, and cloning a repo so you have a second copy of it for an experiment took ages because you couldn't just 'cp -a' the directory, you had to "enlist" in all the files with the server... I don't really see the problem. doing `cp -a` on a large git repo can be an extra 30GB if not more on disk. The tradeoff of a very uncommon operation (duplicating a repo for an experiment sounds like a great use for shelves in p4, or branches in git) taking longer for performance on the golden path seems like a really good one to me.
• fourthark 5y ago
  It has a fantastic GUI three-way merge tool p4merge, which is available for free and works with git.
  • epage 5y ago
    I miss its version of blame (time-lapse view) and wish there was a git gui that matched it.