5 ms·

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/me

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.)
- ansible 5y ago
  There are starting to be more code-aware diff tools. https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic I'm currently trying this out, but I'm not sure if I'll keep using it.
- jshowalter 5y ago
  Rational only stored the diffs between two decorated abstract syntax trees. So you got as-you-like it pretty printing, no conflicts on formatting, just everything you ever dreamed of. In 1987.
CamouflagedKiwi 5y ago
Google has something that acts sort of like it with a bit of modernisation, but it's not actually Perforce any more (it's called Piper, there's some info out there). They out-scaled Perforce some years back.

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.)

ansible 5y ago
There are starting to be more code-aware diff tools. https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic I'm currently trying this out, but I'm not sure if I'll keep using it.
jshowalter 5y ago
Rational only stored the diffs between two decorated abstract syntax trees. So you got as-you-like it pretty printing, no conflicts on formatting, just everything you ever dreamed of. In 1987.

CamouflagedKiwi 5y ago

Google has something that acts sort of like it with a bit of modernisation, but it's not actually Perforce any more (it's called Piper, there's some info out there). They out-scaled Perforce some years back.