[mikepurvis]

Years ago, Google had a gcheckout tool that would trace the dependency information for whatever project you were working on, and then selectively grab the portions of the monorepo that you were going to need for it. Maybe they still have that or it's evolved into something else; I dunno, I haven't been there in a really long time.

Anyway, it seemed like such an obvious complement to the the perforce/monorepo style of working that I came away surprised that perforce wouldn't have hoisted such a thing into their product as a first-class feature. Tracing dependencies across a lot of different build systems is obviously not trivial, but it's not intractable, particularly if the tool is pluggable so that orgs can provide modules to handle their own particular approach.

[jeffbee]

What you are describing is an artifact of the old Perforce which copied everything in your client to local storage. After the conversion to srcfs and piper, which was more than a decade ago, this became unnecessary.

http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/2011/06/build-in-cloud-a...