Comment by 2d8a875f-39a2-4
2 days ago
Always nice to read a new retelling of this old story.
TFA throws some shade at how "a single get of the office repo took some hours" then elides the fact that such an operation was practically impossible to do on git at all without creating a new file system (VFS). Perforce let users check out just the parts of a repo that they needed, so I assume most SD users did that instead of getting every app in the Office suite every time. VFS basically closes that gap on git ("VFS for Git only downloads objects as they are needed").
Perforce/SD were great for the time and for the centralised VCS use case, but the world has moved on I guess.
Some companies have developed their own technology like VFS for use with Perforce, so you can check out the entire suite of applications but only pull the files when you try to access them in a specific way. This is a lot more important in game development where massive source binary assets are stored along side text files.
It uses the same technology that's built into Windows that the remote drive programs (probably) use.
Personally I kind of still want some sort of server based VCS which can store your entire companies set of source without needing to keep the entire history locally when you check out something. But unfortunately git is still good enough to use on an ad-hoc basis between machines for me that I don't feel the need to set up a central server and CI/CD pipeline yet.
Also being able to stash, stage hunks, and interactively rebase commits are features that I like and work well with the way I work.
Doesn’t SVN let you check out and commit any folder or file at any depth of a project you choose? Maybe not the checkouts and commit, but that log history for a single subtree is something I miss from the SVN tooling.
You can indeed. The problem with this strategy is that now you need to maintain the list of directories that needs to be checked out to build each project. And unless this is automated somehow, the documentation will gradually diverge from reality.
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Can you not achieve the log history on a subtree with `git log my/subfolder/`? Tools like TortoiseGit let you right click on a folder and view the log of changes to it.
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My firm still uses perforce and I can't say anyone likes it at this point. You can almost see the light leaves the eyes of new hires when you tell them we don't use git like the rest of the world.
Can't say anything about perforce as I've never used it, but I'd give my left nut to get Google's Piper instead of git at work :)
Piper's syntax is Perforce syntax.
I moved to Google from Microsoft and back when employee orientation involved going to Mountain View and going into labs to learn the basics, it was amusing to see fresh college hires confused at not-git while I sat down and said "It's Source Depot, I know this!"[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng
I concur. I miss citc & fig.
Yeah it's an issue for new devs for sure. TFA even makes the point, "A lot of people felt refreshed by having better transferable skills to the industry. Our onboarding times were slashed by half".
Interesting to hear it was so much of a problem in terms of onboarding time. Maybe Source Depot was particularly weird, and/or MS were using it in a way that made things particularly complicated? Perforce has never felt especially difficult to use to me, and programmers never seem to have any difficulty with it. Artists and designers seem to pick it up quite quickly too. (By and large, in contrast to programmers, they are less in the habit of putting up with the git style of shit.)
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I cannot believe that new hires would be upset by the choice of version control software. They joined a new company after so many hoops and it's on them for having an open mind towards processes and tools in the new company.
I feel like I’ve got an open mind towards processes and tools; the problem with a company using anything other than Git at this point is that unless they have a good explanation for it, it’s not going to be an indicator that the company compared the relative merits of VCS systems and chose something other than Git - it’s going to be an indicator that the company doesn’t have the bandwidth or political will to modernize legacy processes.
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I almost cried of happiness when we moved to git from SVN on my first job after being there for 6 months
They might not be upset on the first few weeks but after a month or so they will be familiar with the pain.
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> I cannot believe that new hires would be upset by the choice of version control software.
I can, if the version control software is just not up to standards.
I absolutely didn’t mind using mercurial/hg, even though I literally haven’t touched it until that point and knew nothing about it, because it is actually pretty good. I like it more than git now.
Git is a decent option that most people would be familiar with, cannot be upset about it either.
On another hand, Source Depot sucked badly, it felt like I had to fight against it the entire time. I wasn’t upset because it was unfamiliar to me. In fact, the more familiar I got with it, the more I disliked it.
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The problem is that you come to a prestigious place like Microsoft and end up using horrible outdated software.
Credit where credit is due at my time at Excel we did improve things a lot (migration from Script# to TypeScript, migration from SourceDepot to git, shorter dev loop and better tooling etc) and a large chunk of development time was spent on developer tooling/happiness.
But it does suck to have to go to one of the old places and use sourcedepot and `osubmit` the "make a change" tool and then go over 16 popups in the "happy path" to submit your patch for review (also done in a weird windows gui review tool)
Git was quite the improvement :D
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A craftsman appreciates good tools.
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Perforce is sufficiently idiosyncratic that it's kinda annoying even when you remember the likes of SVN. Coming to it from Git is a whole world of pain.
If companies don't cater to the whims of the youth, they'd have to hire... old people
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I worked with someone who was surprised the company didn’t use Bitbucket and Discord. They were unhappy about both.
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VFS does not replace Perforce. Most AAA game companies still use Perforce. In particular, they need locks on assets so two people don't edit them at the same time and have an unmergable change and wasted time as one artist has to throw their work away
I'm a bit surprised git doesn't offer a way to checkout only specific parts of the git tree to be honest. It seems like it'd be pretty easy to graft on with an intermediate service that understands object files, etc.
It's existed for a while. Partial clones and LFS.
https://git-scm.com/docs/partial-clone
Thanks!