Comment by dijit
6 days ago
Ha! This post comes right at the time where I finally got around to open sourcing the patches I made to provide Perforce support which I use at my gamedev studio[0].
I find it kind of funny that perforce support was not included, only git support seems to exist in any meaningful way: despite the primary use of copybara being for releasing internal google code (which lives in Piper, a fork of Perforce).
I actually got a bit worried when looking at the git history before making the PR, because there's a lot of Gerrit Change-ID markers (meaning there's some gerrit code review system somewhere which I'm not privvy too) and I might have submitted a PR which never gets upstreamed..
I feel the same pang of pain from the lack of a perforce version of Gerrit/Rietveld.. but, you can't ask for everything!
One reason there's no Perforce support for Gerrit/Rietveld is that Google doesn't use those tools for changes to code that's stored in Piper. Instead, they use Critique:
- https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch19.html
- https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/how-google-takes-the-pain-...
I haven't found anything external that's as good, and am astounded that GitHub's incredibly lackluster PR review tooling is acceptable to most people. If anyone is aware of something in Critique's league, I'd love to hear about it!
Edit: I tried to do a reasonably thorough survey a couple of years ago when I left Google and https://codeapprove.com/ was the closest I found, but there were still many gaps.
Codeapprove creator here! I made it to fill the exact gap you're lamenting, and I still think that gap exists. For a while it seemed like Graphite was going to be the answer but over time they ended up focusing more on the AI angle and less on human review tooling and now it feels just as cluttered and slow as anything else.
I home some other Xoogler comes along and delivers a Critique build for 2026, I still think there's a need!
Gerrit's new UI comes pretty close, and it's also what Google uses for projects living outside of google3.
GitHub's PR review workflow is archaic in comparison, especially now that every page takes 2-3 seconds to load.
> which lives in Piper, a fork of Perforce
This is incorrect. Piper is API-compatible with Perforce but is a totally different implementation, not a fork.
really? I thought Google had paid Perforce for a source license?
Maybe I am wrong.
https://cacm.acm.org/research/why-google-stores-billions-of-...
Don't worry, they accept PRs on that repo. They just merge them internally and then re-export them.
There are some variations, but this is generally the same with all open source projects which live in their internal monorepo, such as gVisor or Bazel.