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Counterpoint: Lots of people actually use and like the D aspect. It’s one of the best things about Git! Local git repos can be shallow or partial clones if you

Counterpoint: Lots of people actually use and like the D aspect. It’s one of the best things about Git! Local git repos can be shallow or partial clones if you insist on it. You say elsewhere that a VCS should support an offline mode instead, but if that’s not a copy of the repository, how is it in any way equivalent and what exactly is the difference? I’ve never understood why people like Perforce; I’ve assumed it’s some kind of weird nostalgia for mainframe user interfaces. I understand that it handles some kinds of large assets better than Git, but Perforce is so bad at everything else.

forrestthewoods 3y ago
People don’t necessarily “like” Perforce. However it is functional for professional game projects, and other systems like Git and Mercurial are not. Perforce is ripe for disruption. > if that’s not a copy of the repository, how is it in any way equivalent and what exactly is the difference? “Distributed” implies the user machine is at least capable of downloading the full repo history. Git defaults to full clones and has various shallow clone features. It also implies support for extremely convoluted graphs and edge cases. Offline implies a single central hub you connect to and sync with at some later point. I expect the only use case for downloading full history to be for backup purposes. Almost all operations can be performed without having access to every version of every file.
maccard 3y ago
I like perforce. It scales significantly better than git, (running git status on a large project, or cloning one takes significantly longer via git than p4). Not having the entire history of a project locally on disk is a pro to me, not a con. P4merge is orders of magnitude better than git's. Atomically incrementing numbers for changelists are superior to sha's if the first thing you do is implement version numbers on top of git. The default workflow is sane and teachable in all of 10 minutes even to non technical people (designers, artists). I like that history is immutable - there are admin tools available if surgery is needed. P4 isnt perfect, but it's definitely got significant advantages over git in many areas.

forrestthewoods 3y ago

People don’t necessarily “like” Perforce. However it is functional for professional game projects, and other systems like Git and Mercurial are not. Perforce is ripe for disruption. > if that’s not a copy of the repository, how is it in any way equivalent and what exactly is the difference? “Distributed” implies the user machine is at least capable of downloading the full repo history. Git defaults to full clones and has various shallow clone features. It also implies support for extremely convoluted graphs and edge cases. Offline implies a single central hub you connect to and sync with at some later point. I expect the only use case for downloading full history to be for backup purposes. Almost all operations can be performed without having access to every version of every file.

maccard 3y ago

I like perforce. It scales significantly better than git, (running git status on a large project, or cloning one takes significantly longer via git than p4). Not having the entire history of a project locally on disk is a pro to me, not a con. P4merge is orders of magnitude better than git's. Atomically incrementing numbers for changelists are superior to sha's if the first thing you do is implement version numbers on top of git. The default workflow is sane and teachable in all of 10 minutes even to non technical people (designers, artists). I like that history is immutable - there are admin tools available if surgery is needed. P4 isnt perfect, but it's definitely got significant advantages over git in many areas.