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by chubot 5248 days ago
I'm just pointing out the Perforce is making crazy profit, and somewhat ironically it's doing so more efficiently (I conjecture) than Facebook, which you are hearing a lot more about.

Perforce is a great system, but it's showing it's age by now. I think there is probably room for someone to make another product in the high end space and make boatloads of cash from big companies, but it's not easy.
1 comments
nfg 5247 days ago
> Perforce is a great system, but it's showing it's age by now.

Care to elaborate? Do you mean in terms of distributed -vs- centralised repos?

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chubot 5247 days ago
Yes partly. Doing lots of commits locally before pushing to others is definitely something I like.

Another part of it is working disconnected -- with so many people coding on their laptops that's actually a pretty common use case.

Also the lack of need to do sysadmin work on git/hg is really nice. I used to run the free Perforce server a long time ago for myself, but it was annoying to do the backups. With git or hg you get whole-repository backups for free.

The "big repository with all dependencies model" has its drawbacks but it's interesting that facebook finds a lot of use for it, and that git is unsuitable for it. Perforce is probably still their best choice in that case.

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forrestthewoods 5247 days ago
The most recent version of Perforce added streams which is their primary answer to git and hg. Easy creation, management, and switching between branches. I've only used this at home and not in a large scale environment yet, but it's promising.

Later this year they are adding p4 Sandbox which allows for disconnected work. When that is complete and working I'm honestly not sure what advantage git will have left other than being free.

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