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Comment by reactordev

6 hours ago

Has nothing to do with Perforce being the Oracle of VCS because it’s baked into the big 3? Riiiight.

Perforce is more the IBM of VCS. Older than it has any right to be. Has quiet "dark matter" support contracts with a lot of companies you wouldn't think need Perforce, but they've been using it for long enough they aren't going to change. Some of those support contracts included complicated forks and homegrown solutions that are so sunk cost as to be nearly black holes (and sometimes so different from baseline Perforce as to be evolutionarily different species).

Well another factor could be that Perforce is a lot easier to use than Git - Actually, would like to think am good with git, but sometimes just wonder how it became so big considering the simple or important things (like check-ins and merges) are so complicated.

  • check-in isn’t a concept in git because there is no server in git. It’s just a log. The beauty of the merkle tree. It’s just GitHub became popular because people didn’t understand that you can rebase from any remote source.

    Delta patches become effortless

    • git is so agnostic about all this stuff that you can even merge completely disparate, unrelated repositories (for example, my own primary "job" repository, and the linux kernel) into the same on-disk structure. Of course, doing so is useless because none of the commits from one repo has any relevance to the other. But because the commits are identified by true GUIDs, there are no collisions, and both sets of commits can happily exist in a single repo.

      It's of almost zero utility, but it does (for me) heighten the beauty and elegance of the concepts behind git (and even, the actual implementation).

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It's not even baked into Google anymore.

  • Technically correct, but Piper is API-compatible with Perforce, so while there's presumably no license fee it's still strongly there in spirit.

    https://graphite.com/blog/google-perforce-to-piper-migration

    • It's hardly the same thing at this point. For instance you could say Nginx is API-compatible with Apache, and yes that is correct (Maybe? Let's not split hairs here). But to go as far as saying Apache is state of the art and link to Apache's homepage (like throw2ih020 did) is just like.... no.

      I think you think I'm trying to correct/one-up reactordev. I'm not. I agree with him. He's pointing out throw2ih020 is being ridiculous, and I'm pointing out that it's even more ridiculous because it's less than 3.

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