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Perforce introduces GitSwarm

perforce.com

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Re: Perforce introduces GitSwarm

#11

Post by baconner »

theonewolf wrote: post #9
baconner wrote: post #6

First tfs, now perforce. The prevalence of git is clearly putting a lot of pressure on "enterprise" source control systems. It makes a lot of sense to just co-opt it and pull it into the rest of their ecosystem. At my org we've been trying to move towards an oss style pull request flow for tools and infrastructure projects but meeting a little resistance because "not enterprise." Getting that workflow into one of the…

Oh I see, so this might be an "Enterprise in" and that's the "key feature." Not that I should expect a lot more on top of Git + GitLab that isn't already there.

I think that's about right. Heck we are actually running gitlab already for a limited set of projects and I could see how I could sell this easier.

Also don't discount how much might be bound up in a system like perforce already so this let's devs get git workflow that they want without being totally separate from all the other codebases.

Re: Perforce introduces GitSwarm

#12

Post by Tuna-Fish »

dahart wrote: post #7
Roboprog wrote: post #2

What value does this add, other than perhaps supporting a proprietary build & deploy system already paid for built around Perforce??? (is the latter a feature, or a bug?) Every commercial revision control system I have ever used (ClearCase; SourceSafe; MKS Source Integrity; Serena VM aka PVCS) has always been much more of a PITA than CVS / SVN / Git. So, yeah, I'm very skeptical.

I had the same skeptical question in my head while reading the landing page / ad. But, I will say I super miss P4's 'timeline'. I haven't used Perforce tools for many years now, but last time I did it was way way easier & faster to figure out who wrote a line of code than it is in git today. And overall, the UI was much better then than any git based UI is today. So, it might be hard for them to explain to git users,…

> it was way way easier & faster to figure out who wrote a line of code than it is in git today.

Don't you have git blame integration in your editor?

Re: Perforce introduces GitSwarm

#13

Post by vvanders »

Roboprog wrote: post #2

What value does this add, other than perhaps supporting a proprietary build & deploy system already paid for built around Perforce??? (is the latter a feature, or a bug?) Every commercial revision control system I have ever used (ClearCase; SourceSafe; MKS Source Integrity; Serena VM aka PVCS) has always been much more of a PITA than CVS / SVN / Git. So, yeah, I'm very skeptical.

Looks like it has integration with an existing P4 server. There's quite a few teams(GameDev+Movies) who use P4 for scale+locking for binary assets where exposing a git endpoint would be useful from a tooling perspective.

Re: Perforce introduces GitSwarm

#14

Post by baconner »

Roboprog wrote: post #2

What value does this add, other than perhaps supporting a proprietary build & deploy system already paid for built around Perforce??? (is the latter a feature, or a bug?) Every commercial revision control system I have ever used (ClearCase; SourceSafe; MKS Source Integrity; Serena VM aka PVCS) has always been much more of a PITA than CVS / SVN / Git. So, yeah, I'm very skeptical.

I think you're basically right here, but many companies are going to have a huge amount of code, builds, work history, etc wrapped up in these systems. So making a big bang move off to a different system can be time consuming, costly, etc. I get why you might want to bridge the gap here or even stick with the other aspects of these systems while abandoning the vcs portion for git in that circumstance.

Also sounds like gitswarm let's you integrate code back into a broader perforce codebase so you could see how in a huge org with hundreds of devs you could move your groups code into a git workflow without having to turn the whole battleship. So I think this solves some problems pragmatically for big teams already entrenched in perforce, but its not ideal.

Re: Perforce introduces GitSwarm

#16

Post by solomatov »

Roboprog wrote: post #2

What value does this add, other than perhaps supporting a proprietary build & deploy system already paid for built around Perforce??? (is the latter a feature, or a bug?) Every commercial revision control system I have ever used (ClearCase; SourceSafe; MKS Source Integrity; Serena VM aka PVCS) has always been much more of a PITA than CVS / SVN / Git. So, yeah, I'm very skeptical.

Actually IMO, their product is much better than CVS and SVN. Much better UI, performance, etc.

However git is a classical disrupting innovation which is destroying their business.

Re: Perforce introduces GitSwarm

#18

Post by JoshTriplett »

baconner wrote: post #6

First tfs, now perforce. The prevalence of git is clearly putting a lot of pressure on "enterprise" source control systems. It makes a lot of sense to just co-opt it and pull it into the rest of their ecosystem. At my org we've been trying to move towards an oss style pull request flow for tools and infrastructure projects but meeting a little resistance because "not enterprise." Getting that workflow into one of the…

> At my org we've been trying to move towards an oss style pull request flow for tools and infrastructure projects but meeting a little resistance because "not enterprise."

I'd love to know what 'because "not enterprise"' means in your case. Resistance to a model without exclusive locks? Resistance to a non-centralized model? Support questions?

Re: Perforce introduces GitSwarm

#19

Post by brianwawok »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #12
dahart wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same skeptical question in my head while reading the landing page / ad. But, I will say I super miss P4's 'timeline'. I haven't used Perforce tools for many years now, but last time I did it was way way easier & faster to figure out who wrote a line of code than it is in git today. And overall, the UI was much better then than any git based UI is today. So, it might be hard for them to explain to git users,…

> it was way way easier & faster to figure out who wrote a line of code than it is in git today. Don't you have git blame integration in your editor?

Git blame will often get the guy who fixed a spelling mistake in a variable, not the guy before him who wrote the code.
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