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> there is something about this letter It's the self-importance of a company which I only just realised isn't just a GitHub repo somehow thinking they need to

by samhw 5y ago

> there is something about this letter It's the self-importance of a company which I only just realised isn't just a GitHub repo somehow thinking they need to write a letter longer than Kurt Cobain's suicide note to tell me that they got acquired by some other bland-as-fuck open-core company. All we needed to hear was: > Hi, I'm the CEO of Puppet. Yeah, that thing you use to do stuff in Chrome with code. Yeah, yeah, we're a company, yup, somehow. Anyway: we're getting acquired by this other company. They're called Perforce. No, you don't know them either. Yeah, they also have some indecipherable enterprise website with some Gartner Quadrant bollocks on it. No, you don't really need to know any of this. Edit: Fuck, that's Puppeteer. OK, I just have no idea what this company does. Oh well.

lupire 5y ago
I don't think Perforce is open core. It's open plugin, aka Embrace Extend, Extinguish. Anyway, emotions aside, it's an important company with a product used by important companies.
- Jason_Gibson 5y ago
  Could you give an example of where it has Embraced->Extinguished?
acatton 5y ago
While I agree with you, Perforce is not open-core at all, in fact, they're are fully closed-source[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perforce#Helix_Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perforce#Helix_Core
- samhw 5y ago
  Ah, fair enough. I suppose I should offer an explicit disclaimer: my descriptions of both companies aren't necessarily 100% accurate, haha.
- Jason_Gibson 5y ago
  While the Helix Core Server itself is not Open Source, much of the surrounding tooling is. E.g., see the code here: https://swarm.workshop.perforce.com/user/perforce_software https://swarm.workshop.perforce.com/user/perforce_software I don't think it'd be fair to say it's "fully" closed-source.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
secondcoming 5y ago
How has nobody heard of Perforce. It was the SCM of choice for a lot of companies until git came along. Doesn't Google still use it? BTW, Perforce's diffing/merging tools [0] are fantastic. [0] https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core-apps/merge-diff-tool-p4merge https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core-apps/merge-diff...
- locusofself 5y ago
  i thought google used mercurial (hg) ?
  - MauranKilom 5y ago
    They were on Perforce for a long time. See e.g. https://info.perforce.com/rs/perforce/images/GoogleWhitePaper-StillAllonOneServer-PerforceatScale.pdf https://info.perforce.com/rs/perforce/images/GoogleWhitePape... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889958.
  - sulam 5y ago
    Facebook uses Mercurial for its big monorepo. Google’s big monorepo was once P4 but isn’t anymore.
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      Amazon was P4 when I was there (a long, long time ago). I heard that more recently they were still trying to get off of it.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  Last time I used Perforce, more than a decade ago, the visual diff app was fantastic and all other aspects were total shit. Would rather use Subversion if someone insisted on not using git.
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  Instead of ranting about how much I am annoyed by this problem, let me just ask: Are there any good diff tools/algorithms that don't consistently freak out when you change the indentation of a block of code? Yes, diff tools like to go by unique/common lines, and yes, those two } are technically the only common line in this chunk, but that is beyond useless when all you did was wrap something in an if/else. (And yes, P4V tools have "ignore all white space" - which is a great way to produce a completely useless merge result, in my experience. If you can tune out of nonsensical indentation in one side of the comparison, it's at least passable for diffing.)
emilecantin 5y ago
Puppet is one of the DevOps configuration languages. IIRC it had mostly "won" against Chef, and subsequently "lost" against Ansible. Perforce is basically Git, but shittier and proprietary. I think it's mostly popular in the games industry.
- riyadparvez 5y ago
  > Perforce is basically Git, but shittier and proprietary. I think it's mostly popular in the games industry. I think Google also uses Perforce. It's understandable because Google started before git.
  - Arainach 5y ago
    They don't, though they used to long ago. https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-st...
- bovermyer 5y ago
  Interesting. My recollection is that Chef and Ansible both completely ran roughshod over Puppet, and that Puppet is now in the "antiquated tools that used to be relevant" bucket. Anecdotal, yeah. But DevOps is my daily work, and I like to think I keep an eye on the tools ecosystem.
  - polynomial 5y ago
    That was my sense too back than, Puppet had early traction, but lost out to Chef, and then Ansible turned out to be the marathoner of the 3.
    - tnolet 5y ago
      Seems like doing $100M+ in ARR (as hinted in the article) is a win. Even more because Chef was acquired for $220M. I think Perforce will pay a bit more for Puppet.
nuker 5y ago
> Yeah, that thing you use to do stuff in Chrome with code. In where?
- samhw 5y ago
  I'm not sure I can parse this question successfully... But, in case this happens to answer your question, it was Puppeteer I had in mind (like I mentioned in the edit).
  - nuker 5y ago
    I meant why Chrome? When I used Puppet, it was in terminal and in git to edit stuff. Parsing is easy, use keyword in.
    - Macha 5y ago
      Puppeteer is an automation library to remote control Chrome. The parent poster had confused Puppet (the deployment automation software) and Puppeteer (the chrome remote control software).
      - samhw 5y ago
        Yup, in answer to the guy above: this is correct. Thanks for clarifying for me! (Some day HN will figure out notifications and I’ll be able to reply to comments myself within 24 hours...)
  - nuker 5y ago
    Ahh, got it, Puppeteer! Checking out
    - samhw 5y ago
      Nice! And I’m not a web engineer so I’m not really au fait with Puppeteer - but fingers crossed it’s useful to you. (I simply hadn’t heard of Puppet at all, so Puppeteer seemingly came into my head first.)

by samhw 5y ago

lupire 5y ago

I don't think Perforce is open core. It's open plugin, aka Embrace Extend, Extinguish. Anyway, emotions aside, it's an important company with a product used by important companies.

Jason_Gibson 5y ago
Could you give an example of where it has Embraced->Extinguished?

acatton 5y ago

While I agree with you, Perforce is not open-core at all, in fact, they're are fully closed-source[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perforce#Helix_Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perforce#Helix_Core

samhw 5y ago
Ah, fair enough. I suppose I should offer an explicit disclaimer: my descriptions of both companies aren't necessarily 100% accurate, haha.
Jason_Gibson 5y ago
While the Helix Core Server itself is not Open Source, much of the surrounding tooling is. E.g., see the code here: https://swarm.workshop.perforce.com/user/perforce_software https://swarm.workshop.perforce.com/user/perforce_software I don't think it'd be fair to say it's "fully" closed-source.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

secondcoming 5y ago

How has nobody heard of Perforce. It was the SCM of choice for a lot of companies until git came along. Doesn't Google still use it? BTW, Perforce's diffing/merging tools [0] are fantastic. [0] https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core-apps/merge-diff-tool-p4merge https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core-apps/merge-diff...

locusofself 5y ago
i thought google used mercurial (hg) ?
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  They were on Perforce for a long time. See e.g. https://info.perforce.com/rs/perforce/images/GoogleWhitePaper-StillAllonOneServer-PerforceatScale.pdf https://info.perforce.com/rs/perforce/images/GoogleWhitePape... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889958.
- sulam 5y ago
  Facebook uses Mercurial for its big monorepo. Google’s big monorepo was once P4 but isn’t anymore.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Amazon was P4 when I was there (a long, long time ago). I heard that more recently they were still trying to get off of it.
KerrAvon 5y ago
Last time I used Perforce, more than a decade ago, the visual diff app was fantastic and all other aspects were total shit. Would rather use Subversion if someone insisted on not using git.
MauranKilom 5y ago
Instead of ranting about how much I am annoyed by this problem, let me just ask: Are there any good diff tools/algorithms that don't consistently freak out when you change the indentation of a block of code? Yes, diff tools like to go by unique/common lines, and yes, those two } are technically the only common line in this chunk, but that is beyond useless when all you did was wrap something in an if/else. (And yes, P4V tools have "ignore all white space" - which is a great way to produce a completely useless merge result, in my experience. If you can tune out of nonsensical indentation in one side of the comparison, it's at least passable for diffing.)

emilecantin 5y ago

Puppet is one of the DevOps configuration languages. IIRC it had mostly "won" against Chef, and subsequently "lost" against Ansible. Perforce is basically Git, but shittier and proprietary. I think it's mostly popular in the games industry.

riyadparvez 5y ago
> Perforce is basically Git, but shittier and proprietary. I think it's mostly popular in the games industry. I think Google also uses Perforce. It's understandable because Google started before git.
- Arainach 5y ago
  They don't, though they used to long ago. https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-st...
bovermyer 5y ago
Interesting. My recollection is that Chef and Ansible both completely ran roughshod over Puppet, and that Puppet is now in the "antiquated tools that used to be relevant" bucket. Anecdotal, yeah. But DevOps is my daily work, and I like to think I keep an eye on the tools ecosystem.
- polynomial 5y ago
  That was my sense too back than, Puppet had early traction, but lost out to Chef, and then Ansible turned out to be the marathoner of the 3.
  - tnolet 5y ago
    Seems like doing $100M+ in ARR (as hinted in the article) is a win. Even more because Chef was acquired for $220M. I think Perforce will pay a bit more for Puppet.

nuker 5y ago

> Yeah, that thing you use to do stuff in Chrome with code. In where?

samhw 5y ago
I'm not sure I can parse this question successfully... But, in case this happens to answer your question, it was Puppeteer I had in mind (like I mentioned in the edit).
- nuker 5y ago
  I meant why Chrome? When I used Puppet, it was in terminal and in git to edit stuff. Parsing is easy, use keyword in.
  - Macha 5y ago
    Puppeteer is an automation library to remote control Chrome. The parent poster had confused Puppet (the deployment automation software) and Puppeteer (the chrome remote control software).
    - samhw 5y ago
      Yup, in answer to the guy above: this is correct. Thanks for clarifying for me! (Some day HN will figure out notifications and I’ll be able to reply to comments myself within 24 hours...)
- nuker 5y ago
  Ahh, got it, Puppeteer! Checking out
  - samhw 5y ago
    Nice! And I’m not a web engineer so I’m not really au fait with Puppeteer - but fingers crossed it’s useful to you. (I simply hadn’t heard of Puppet at all, so Puppeteer seemingly came into my head first.)