Comment by forrestthewoods
3 hours ago
> You do not "lock assets",
Uhhhhhh. Locking binary assets is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY in Git. Except Git can't actually do that. So what locking binary assets Git looks like in practice is an unenforced message in Slack saying "hey I'm changing this file please no one else touch it".
Git's design provides zero value and zero affordances for solving the very very real problem of unmergable binary assets.
> there is no "merging into streams" equivalent.
Weird take. Streams is Perforce's mediocre take on Git branches. P4 stream merge is close enough to Git branch merge that I would say they're in the same family.
> P4 struck me as "what a for-profit corporation would imagine a VCS should be like, if they'd never seen git".
And yet Git has almost zero mind share in gamedev because it doesn't solve the problem.
P4 is somewhat mediocre. And it's made zero improvement in ~8 years since getting bought up by PE.
But I can also teach a game designer or artist who has never heard of source control how to correctly and safely use P4 in about 15 minutes. Meanwhile you can tell Git is badly designed because there are 10,000+ tutorials explaining how easy it is! Spoiler: things that are actually easy do not need 10,000 tutorials telling you that it is easy.
> Git's design provides zero value and zero affordances for solving the very very real problem of unmergable binary assets.
OK, I think this is well-established by up-thread comments, and I don't disagree with it at all (though note that its not just binary assets, it's anything that isn't line oriented, which includes for example XML).
I didn't realize that LinearIO's comment was really that specific; it appeared to be describing general properties of P4 unrelated to the binary issue.
The 10k tutorials on git might indicate issues with its design, or it might indicate its massive popularity. Hard to say.
I just remember that learning to use P4 required learning a ton of concepts for what P4 thinks your workflow ought to be; learning git has largely just required a simple 1:1 mapping between git commands and the things I do with VCS 98% of the time.
> The 10k tutorials on git might indicate issues with its design, or it might indicate its massive popularity. Hard to say.
It's "hard to say" if you want to ignore the fact that it requires 10k tutorials. Meanwhile, there are 500+ person companies with non technical users using P4 with literally 0 onboarding other than "by the way, undo is broken don't use it".
> I just remember that learning to use P4 required learning a ton of concepts for what P4 thinks your workflow ought to be; learning git has largely just required a simple 1:1 mapping between git commands and the things I do with VCS 98% of the time.
Using P4 is: Download P4V, install plugin for $EDITOR, and double click on a changelist to submit.