Comment by 90s_dev
3 days ago
I actually remember using Perforce back in like 2010 or something. And I can't remember why or for which client or employer. I just remember it was stupid.
3 days ago
I actually remember using Perforce back in like 2010 or something. And I can't remember why or for which client or employer. I just remember it was stupid.
I used Perforce a lot in the 90s, when it was simple (just p4, p4d, and p4merge!), super fast, and never crashed or corrupted itself. Way simpler, and easier to train newbies on, than any of the alternatives.
Subdirectories-as-branches (like bare repo + workspace-per-branch practices w/git) is so much easier for average computer users to grok, too. Very easy to admin too.
No idea what the current "enterprisey" offering is like, though.
For corporate teams, it was a game changer. So much better than any alternative at the time.
We're all so used to git that we've become used to it's terribleness and see every other system as deficient. Training and supporting a bunch of SWE-adjacent users (hw eng, ee, quality, managers, etc) is a really, really good reality check on how horrible the git UX and datamodel is (e.g. obliterating secrets--security, trade, or PII/PHI--that get accidentally checked in is a stop-the-world moment).
For the record, I happily use git, jj, and Gitea all day every day now (and selected them for my current $employer). However, also FTR, I've used SCCS, CVS, SVN, VSS, TFS and MKS SI professionally, each for years at a time.
All of the comments dismissing tools that are significantly better for most use cases other than distributed OSS, but lost the popularity contest, is shortsighted.
Git has a loooong way to go before it's as good in other ways as many of its "competitors". Learning about their benefits is very enlightening.
And, IIRC, p4 now integrates with git, though I've never used it.
I've used CVS, SVN, TFS, Mercurial, and Git in the past, so I have plenty of exposure to different options. I have to deal with Perforce in my current workplace and I have to say that even from this perspective it's honestly pretty bad in terms of how convoluted things are.
I don't disagree at all--p4 was kick-ass back in the day but the world, and our expectations, have moved on. Plus, they went all high-street enterprisey.
What makes it convoluted? Where did it lose the beat?
Perforce is really nice if you need to source control 16k textures next to code without thinking too much about it. Git LFS absolutely works but it's more complicated and has less support in industry tooling. Perforce also makes it easier to purge (obliterate) old revisions of files without breaking history for everyone. This can be invaluable if your p4 server starts to run out of disk space.
The ability to lock files centrally might seem outdated by the branching and PR model, but for some organizations the centralized solution works way better because they have built viable business processes around it. Centralized can absolutely smoke distributed in terms of iteration latency if the loop is tight enough and the team is cooperating well.
I agree with everything you say except git-lfs works. For modern game dev (where a full checkout is around 1TB of data) git-lfs is too slow, too error prone and too wasteful of disk space.
Perforce is a complete PITA to work with, too expensive and is outdated/flawed for modern dev BUT for binary files it's really the only game in town (closely followed by svn but people have forgotten how good svn was and only remember how bad it was at tracking branch merging).
Sounds like the filesystem filter is required for the files in the repository and not just the metadata in the .git folder.
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Perforce is convoluted and confusing, but I don't think it's really fair to call it stupid. It is still virtually unmatched in a couple of areas.
I would say it's no more convoluted and confusing than git. I used Perforce professionally for quite a few years in gamedev, and found that a bit confusing at first. Then I was self-employed and used git, and coming to git from Perforce I found it very confusing at first. But then I grew to love it. Now I'm back to working for a big gamedev company and we use Perforce and I feel very proficient in both.
I wasn't being fair, I was being mean. Perforce is stupid and ugly.
There's still a lot of Perforce around. I've thankfully managed to avoid it but I have plenty of friends in the industry who still have to use it.
Perforce is still widely used in the game industry
And expensive.