It's interesting to see the wheel reinvented. We used to run a 500gb art sync/200gb code sync with ~2tb back end repo back when I was in gamedev. P4 also has proper locking, it is really the is right tool if you've got large assets that need to be coordinated and versioned.
Another downside is that it consumes insane resources (our servers are in the dozens of TiB of ram, with huge NVMe based storage arrays directly attached)
Another downside is that you have to maintain connection to p4 to do any VCS operations (stashing included).
Another downside is that branches are very "expensive" (often taking days) and are impossible to reconcile. We never re-merge to MAIN.
This kind of comment isn't helpful. Of course, there have been ways to copy large files around since there were networks. What's new in this protocol enhancement is that this works within the context of a Merkle tree-based technology (upon which all DVCS's are based). To use your analogy, yes this is a wheel but it's built with rubber instead of wood and iron.
DVCS is in direct opposition of workflows that include binary files(yes I'm aware that git lfs has locking, it's also centrally orchestrated) because you can't merge almost every binary format.
We were using P4 ~15 years ago for these workflows and rather than understanding what made them work people are just rediscovering the same problems that have already been solved.
My guess is that we'll next see a solution that dynamically caches most downloaded files in a geographic friendly way, heck we may even call it "P4Proxy".
I've seen so much FUD around how git is the "one true workflow" because other solutions "don't scale" when they don't understand the constraints that certain workflows impose. Git/DVCS is great for a lot of things but sometimes you should use the right tool for the job rather than hack something together.
[Edit]
These reasons are exactly why you see Unreal supporting P4/SVN out of the box[1] and no mention of git.
I think this is a very p4 centric view of the world.
Locking helps with preventing collisions, but honestly the issue is still always communication. Why are people even touching files they shouldn't be touching?
Meanwhile perforce is a pain for code heavy projects and requiring a central perforce server. Git works great there.
The issue is neither is a silver bullet for the others workflow and needs, and they both suck horribly for mixed code and binary asset workflows.
That's not even considering cost.
Meanwhile film studios generally prefer keeping the considerations separate and using symlinks or URI to their data store and that works really well. But that doesn't work great for remote workflows.
So again, I think you're applying a very p4, game centric view to this. There are lots of different use cases and team structures that none of these version control systems are able to address in their entirety.
but honestly the issue is still always communication. Why are people even touching files they shouldn't be touching?
Because there's 300+ people working on a project, and it's not feasible to know what every other person is working on or planning on working on.
The file lock (code can be merged too, just like git, so this is only really for binary assets) is a crude communication tool saying "hey I'm using this file".
Meanwhile perforce is a pain for code heavy projects and requiring a central perforce server. Git works great there.
I think you're applying a git biased view here. I don't think perforce is unsuitable for code heavy projects at all (see workspace views as a prime example), and for the majority of people, having a central server isn't an issue. Most people treat github/gitlab as a centralised server anyway. I've _never_ in a decade of programming heard someone suggest adding an extra remote to git so I can share your changes, it's always been "push it as a separate branch and I'll merge it". If you have a missing internet connection, you're likely not able to share code _anyway_, and with p4 you can always reconcile offline work when you're back online.
Meanwhile film studios go on with 300+ people without hitting the issue of people hitting the same asset files without needing locking.
I think locking is a fine utility to have but I think a lot of workflows use it to workaround poor communication.
And I think you're constraining your views of git to just your workflow.
I've worked in a lot of scenarios where you need multiple remotes such as having an internal repo and an external one.
And similarly there are lots of scenarios where having a decentralized copy of the report is very useful for being able to work in offline scenarios and compare multiple branches. Things like when commuting on a plane or being in low connection areas.
I don't see how my view is git centric. I'm saying each VCS has very useful areas and equally big rough spots. The problem is that each VCS group believes there's is the only right system.
If by P4 centric you also mean SVN as well then sure.
I will say however that if you think locking is optional then you already don't understand these workflows and why they're so critical. Art/design/animation doesn't care that "they should not have been touching the file" they just care that they have to throw away two days of work because someone made multiple edits to the same package file. I've literally seen multiple teams almost come to blows when this happens.
You can separate code from art/assets. That comes at an integration and iteration cost, it'll drive your designers mad.
There are workflows out there where code is not the first class citizen, in those cases I've seen git shoehorned in and untold pain follows.
I've worked as a pipeline supervisor at one of the biggest VFX studios. I very much understand these workflows. I've worked as an artist and a tech artist in perforce and SVN workflows too. I've had to support the workflows of a 1000+ workforce across multiple locations.
I don't think attributing my disagreement with you to not understanding workflows is a fair characterization.
I still think locking , while useful, is only mandatory for work cultures with poor communication. Otherwise, many companies get by with very large workforces who don't hit these issues without having locking.
Separation of code and art assets also don't need to be painful. It's very doable but does require some amount of architectural consideration.
And I very much acknowledge there are projects where code isn't the majority makeup, which is why I say that none of the VCS systems cover mixed projects well or cover all the needs of the others well.
It sounds like we just come from different development cultures. Your solution to lack of locking sounds like a top-down hierarchy that wouldn't be flexible enough to support the teams I've worked with.
Having seen both approaches(and how they break down) I'll take a centralized locking solution over communication mistakes that lead to days of work being lost.
That's fair to agree to disagree but I also again think it's unfair to characterize my pipelines as not flexible enough.
For context I developed the publishing pipelines for the majority of departments in the studio. I have several hundreds of assets being published through my pipelines on a daily basis, if not more, from a variety of departments.
We only hit collisions on a very rare basis, and which were often resolved in an hour or two in the worst case.
We've scaled this from very small teams to large ones, from very scrappy realtime productions to feature length offline rendered films.
I don't doubt that locking helps. I just argue that maybe it's not as critical as people make it out to seem.
What happens if you're not around to drive the process? What about if you don't have the organizational backing to drive the process? What if a team goes AWOL or isn't bought in to your process? I've seen variants of all those happen in production in one form or another.
At the end of the day humans make mistakes, especially when involving communication. I'd rather have a physical system that prevents breaks instead of requiring cross-team/cross-discipline coordination.
Maybe gamedev is much more coupled than film(we regularly had design, animation, art and code touching the same common core packages). Look at Unreal or any other gamedev pipeline and you'll see a bias for locking source control solutions.
It's very rare that someone needs to be around to oversee the process. Tooling guides the vast majority of users in to a workflow that works while still being flexible should they need it.
Lack of organizational backup, do you mean cultural from the studio or infrastructure? Both are a problem no matter what solution you pick.
If a team goes AWOL, that's on them. The tooling usually allows for some amount of arbitrary workflow but they can't go completely off the rails. But that's true of p4 too. So I think that scenario would have to be more specific.
And yes people make mistakes, and you need tooling to guide them. Locking is a tool, but it's not the only tool. I feel very much that many workflows use it to hide deeper issues. That's not to say it's not valid, it is, but it's not a panacea either.
Unreal heavily favors perforce and SVN because that's what it was designed around. There's no absolute reason it could not work with other versioning systems and their paradigms if it came to being necessary.
Unity on the other hand is quite happy to work with any version control system, and works quite well with git or perforce.
You again seem to be trying to approach this from the angle of only the system you're familiar with working. But maybe try stepping outside the box and seeing if your workflow isn't a byproduct of your tools.
After all, you were asking git users to look at perforce as the solution. I don't think it's fair to then go ahead and assume that p4 is the only workable solution.
Oh I've been working with git for ~9 years now, it's not a lack of familiarity.
Take AOSP, even Google had to overlay the repo[1] tool to scale past git. It's a hot pile of garbage that won't let you sync all repos to a specific point in time. Not to mention the nature of cross-repo commits are not atomic. Good luck bisecting a breaking change across millions of lines of code and build files.
I've spent over a week chasing down how some homespun tool for storing binary assets side-by-side with git works so I could get a single file into a build.
Last company I was at which was a leader in the Android space just put the whole thing in P4, branch per device and it worked without many major issues. Pulling source took 1/50th the time a repo sync took. Literally an A/B comparison of one tech vs the other. That's before you even start to consider prebuilts.
Like I said, I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Hi, I work at Google and replied to you way up-thread. I built a CI system used by ChromeOS based on Repo and even contributed some changes to it. While I don't like it much, it is useful. You misunderstand or are misinformed about many aspects of it.
Google had to overlay the repo[1] tool to scale past git
It was created to allow for a forest of git repos to all coexist in a world in which git submodules wasn't suitable yet OR the repos spanned security domains. However, almost all of the shortcomings of submodules have been addressed and so—at least—the team that I lead now is considering migration to it from Repo.
cross-repo commits are not atomic
Yes, that is a feature. But I think you meant that there's no cross-repo coordinate in the timeline to sync to. However, there is. That's exactly what a Repo tool manifest snapshot is. Our CI system ensured that change that had deps across repos were committed and a Repo manifest snapshot only was taken with all inter-commit deps satisfied.
Good luck bisecting a breaking change across millions of lines of code and build files
The team that I led implemented this. We simply snapshotted the forest at every T time intervals. For bisection, we walked the snapshots. Once a specific manifest snapshot was identified as the culprit, we further bisected within repos for a specific change.
Pulling source took 1/50th the time a repo sync took.
Yes, that's what the partial clones (the article you replied to) and sparse checkouts solves. Once these two things are widely available, I don't see any benefits to P4 remaining.
None of the things you're talking about exist within the repo tool, it sounds like these are all things that you had to layer on top with a separate CI system.
It's been 12 years since the Dream was released and we're still not to the same level of perf/features as just stuffing the whole of AOSP in P4. I get that git has advantages, and it's an awesome tool when used appropriately but the desire to use it to solve every SCM problem under the sun is a bit misguided.
Why are people even touching files they shouldn't be touching?
I don't think it's accurate to say they shouldn't be touching the files.
It's possible to make two unrelated changes in the same binary file just as it is possible to make two unrelated changes in a source file (or other merge-friendly text file).
Just as there may be nothing wrong if one person changes the function foo() in a file and someone else changes the function bar() in that same file, there may be nothing wrong if one person opens a CAD file and makes a change to a drawing in one part and another person makes a change to a different part of the same drawing.
In that case, they could coordinate by communicating (even though their tasks are unrelated) but then they're just doing the same thing as locking the files but manually and informally (and probably inconsistently) without the benefits of automation.
Of course there are times when locking catches failures to communicate, but that doesn't mean that that's what locking is for.
I love P4 for just working, but I absolutely can't stand the limited shelving ability. I ended up writing a helper program that lets me shuffle local changes off to a git repo just so I could manage working on several overlapping changelists. Perforce would be so much more usable if they would include this sort of basic functionality right out of the box. The thing git gets right is that you often need to juggle several threads of change at the same time, and those threads may have complex branching as you try out different approaches and combine the best pieces at the end.
p4 is still great, that there are workarounds to be usable on similar workloads on git doesn't takeaway p4s inherent advantages. they're two very different tools.
Comments
Also known as workspace views in P4.
It's interesting to see the wheel reinvented. We used to run a 500gb art sync/200gb code sync with ~2tb back end repo back when I was in gamedev. P4 also has proper locking, it is really the is right tool if you've got large assets that need to be coordinated and versioned.
Only downside of course is that it isn't free.
Another downside is that it consumes insane resources (our servers are in the dozens of TiB of ram, with huge NVMe based storage arrays directly attached)
Another downside is that you have to maintain connection to p4 to do any VCS operations (stashing included).
Another downside is that branches are very "expensive" (often taking days) and are impossible to reconcile. We never re-merge to MAIN.
This kind of comment isn't helpful. Of course, there have been ways to copy large files around since there were networks. What's new in this protocol enhancement is that this works within the context of a Merkle tree-based technology (upon which all DVCS's are based). To use your analogy, yes this is a wheel but it's built with rubber instead of wood and iron.
I guess I should have expanded more.
DVCS is in direct opposition of workflows that include binary files(yes I'm aware that git lfs has locking, it's also centrally orchestrated) because you can't merge almost every binary format.
We were using P4 ~15 years ago for these workflows and rather than understanding what made them work people are just rediscovering the same problems that have already been solved.
My guess is that we'll next see a solution that dynamically caches most downloaded files in a geographic friendly way, heck we may even call it "P4Proxy".
I've seen so much FUD around how git is the "one true workflow" because other solutions "don't scale" when they don't understand the constraints that certain workflows impose. Git/DVCS is great for a lot of things but sometimes you should use the right tool for the job rather than hack something together.
[Edit] These reasons are exactly why you see Unreal supporting P4/SVN out of the box[1] and no mention of git.
[1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/UI/SourceControl/...
I think this is a very p4 centric view of the world.
Locking helps with preventing collisions, but honestly the issue is still always communication. Why are people even touching files they shouldn't be touching?
Meanwhile perforce is a pain for code heavy projects and requiring a central perforce server. Git works great there.
The issue is neither is a silver bullet for the others workflow and needs, and they both suck horribly for mixed code and binary asset workflows.
That's not even considering cost.
Meanwhile film studios generally prefer keeping the considerations separate and using symlinks or URI to their data store and that works really well. But that doesn't work great for remote workflows.
So again, I think you're applying a very p4, game centric view to this. There are lots of different use cases and team structures that none of these version control systems are able to address in their entirety.
Because there's 300+ people working on a project, and it's not feasible to know what every other person is working on or planning on working on.
The file lock (code can be merged too, just like git, so this is only really for binary assets) is a crude communication tool saying "hey I'm using this file".
I think you're applying a git biased view here. I don't think perforce is unsuitable for code heavy projects at all (see workspace views as a prime example), and for the majority of people, having a central server isn't an issue. Most people treat github/gitlab as a centralised server anyway. I've _never_ in a decade of programming heard someone suggest adding an extra remote to git so I can share your changes, it's always been "push it as a separate branch and I'll merge it". If you have a missing internet connection, you're likely not able to share code _anyway_, and with p4 you can always reconcile offline work when you're back online.
Meanwhile film studios go on with 300+ people without hitting the issue of people hitting the same asset files without needing locking.
I think locking is a fine utility to have but I think a lot of workflows use it to workaround poor communication.
And I think you're constraining your views of git to just your workflow.
I've worked in a lot of scenarios where you need multiple remotes such as having an internal repo and an external one.
And similarly there are lots of scenarios where having a decentralized copy of the report is very useful for being able to work in offline scenarios and compare multiple branches. Things like when commuting on a plane or being in low connection areas.
I don't see how my view is git centric. I'm saying each VCS has very useful areas and equally big rough spots. The problem is that each VCS group believes there's is the only right system.
If by P4 centric you also mean SVN as well then sure.
I will say however that if you think locking is optional then you already don't understand these workflows and why they're so critical. Art/design/animation doesn't care that "they should not have been touching the file" they just care that they have to throw away two days of work because someone made multiple edits to the same package file. I've literally seen multiple teams almost come to blows when this happens.
You can separate code from art/assets. That comes at an integration and iteration cost, it'll drive your designers mad.
There are workflows out there where code is not the first class citizen, in those cases I've seen git shoehorned in and untold pain follows.
I've worked as a pipeline supervisor at one of the biggest VFX studios. I very much understand these workflows. I've worked as an artist and a tech artist in perforce and SVN workflows too. I've had to support the workflows of a 1000+ workforce across multiple locations.
I don't think attributing my disagreement with you to not understanding workflows is a fair characterization.
I still think locking , while useful, is only mandatory for work cultures with poor communication. Otherwise, many companies get by with very large workforces who don't hit these issues without having locking.
Separation of code and art assets also don't need to be painful. It's very doable but does require some amount of architectural consideration.
And I very much acknowledge there are projects where code isn't the majority makeup, which is why I say that none of the VCS systems cover mixed projects well or cover all the needs of the others well.
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.
It sounds like we just come from different development cultures. Your solution to lack of locking sounds like a top-down hierarchy that wouldn't be flexible enough to support the teams I've worked with.
Having seen both approaches(and how they break down) I'll take a centralized locking solution over communication mistakes that lead to days of work being lost.
That's fair to agree to disagree but I also again think it's unfair to characterize my pipelines as not flexible enough.
For context I developed the publishing pipelines for the majority of departments in the studio. I have several hundreds of assets being published through my pipelines on a daily basis, if not more, from a variety of departments.
We only hit collisions on a very rare basis, and which were often resolved in an hour or two in the worst case.
We've scaled this from very small teams to large ones, from very scrappy realtime productions to feature length offline rendered films.
I don't doubt that locking helps. I just argue that maybe it's not as critical as people make it out to seem.
What happens if you're not around to drive the process? What about if you don't have the organizational backing to drive the process? What if a team goes AWOL or isn't bought in to your process? I've seen variants of all those happen in production in one form or another.
At the end of the day humans make mistakes, especially when involving communication. I'd rather have a physical system that prevents breaks instead of requiring cross-team/cross-discipline coordination.
Maybe gamedev is much more coupled than film(we regularly had design, animation, art and code touching the same common core packages). Look at Unreal or any other gamedev pipeline and you'll see a bias for locking source control solutions.
It's very rare that someone needs to be around to oversee the process. Tooling guides the vast majority of users in to a workflow that works while still being flexible should they need it.
Lack of organizational backup, do you mean cultural from the studio or infrastructure? Both are a problem no matter what solution you pick.
If a team goes AWOL, that's on them. The tooling usually allows for some amount of arbitrary workflow but they can't go completely off the rails. But that's true of p4 too. So I think that scenario would have to be more specific.
And yes people make mistakes, and you need tooling to guide them. Locking is a tool, but it's not the only tool. I feel very much that many workflows use it to hide deeper issues. That's not to say it's not valid, it is, but it's not a panacea either.
Unreal heavily favors perforce and SVN because that's what it was designed around. There's no absolute reason it could not work with other versioning systems and their paradigms if it came to being necessary.
Unity on the other hand is quite happy to work with any version control system, and works quite well with git or perforce.
You again seem to be trying to approach this from the angle of only the system you're familiar with working. But maybe try stepping outside the box and seeing if your workflow isn't a byproduct of your tools.
After all, you were asking git users to look at perforce as the solution. I don't think it's fair to then go ahead and assume that p4 is the only workable solution.
Oh I've been working with git for ~9 years now, it's not a lack of familiarity.
Take AOSP, even Google had to overlay the repo[1] tool to scale past git. It's a hot pile of garbage that won't let you sync all repos to a specific point in time. Not to mention the nature of cross-repo commits are not atomic. Good luck bisecting a breaking change across millions of lines of code and build files.
I've spent over a week chasing down how some homespun tool for storing binary assets side-by-side with git works so I could get a single file into a build.
Last company I was at which was a leader in the Android space just put the whole thing in P4, branch per device and it worked without many major issues. Pulling source took 1/50th the time a repo sync took. Literally an A/B comparison of one tech vs the other. That's before you even start to consider prebuilts.
Like I said, I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.
[1] https://gerrit.googlesource.com/git-repo/
Hi, I work at Google and replied to you way up-thread. I built a CI system used by ChromeOS based on Repo and even contributed some changes to it. While I don't like it much, it is useful. You misunderstand or are misinformed about many aspects of it.
It was created to allow for a forest of git repos to all coexist in a world in which git submodules wasn't suitable yet OR the repos spanned security domains. However, almost all of the shortcomings of submodules have been addressed and so—at least—the team that I lead now is considering migration to it from Repo.
Yes, that is a feature. But I think you meant that there's no cross-repo coordinate in the timeline to sync to. However, there is. That's exactly what a Repo tool manifest snapshot is. Our CI system ensured that change that had deps across repos were committed and a Repo manifest snapshot only was taken with all inter-commit deps satisfied.
The team that I led implemented this. We simply snapshotted the forest at every T time intervals. For bisection, we walked the snapshots. Once a specific manifest snapshot was identified as the culprit, we further bisected within repos for a specific change.
Yes, that's what the partial clones (the article you replied to) and sparse checkouts solves. Once these two things are widely available, I don't see any benefits to P4 remaining.
None of the things you're talking about exist within the repo tool, it sounds like these are all things that you had to layer on top with a separate CI system.
It's been 12 years since the Dream was released and we're still not to the same level of perf/features as just stuffing the whole of AOSP in P4. I get that git has advantages, and it's an awesome tool when used appropriately but the desire to use it to solve every SCM problem under the sun is a bit misguided.
I don't think it's accurate to say they shouldn't be touching the files.
It's possible to make two unrelated changes in the same binary file just as it is possible to make two unrelated changes in a source file (or other merge-friendly text file).
Just as there may be nothing wrong if one person changes the function foo() in a file and someone else changes the function bar() in that same file, there may be nothing wrong if one person opens a CAD file and makes a change to a drawing in one part and another person makes a change to a different part of the same drawing.
In that case, they could coordinate by communicating (even though their tasks are unrelated) but then they're just doing the same thing as locking the files but manually and informally (and probably inconsistently) without the benefits of automation.
Of course there are times when locking catches failures to communicate, but that doesn't mean that that's what locking is for.
Sure, but I would argue it's a poor system that is setup to require serial editing to a non diffable file.
Again, I'm not saying locking is an invalid solution. It is. But to me, it's often (but not always), a crutch for a deeper issue.
That binary file should be set up to be modular if it is intended to have areas that multiple users can touch without directly affecting each other.
I love P4 for just working, but I absolutely can't stand the limited shelving ability. I ended up writing a helper program that lets me shuffle local changes off to a git repo just so I could manage working on several overlapping changelists. Perforce would be so much more usable if they would include this sort of basic functionality right out of the box. The thing git gets right is that you often need to juggle several threads of change at the same time, and those threads may have complex branching as you try out different approaches and combine the best pieces at the end.
P4 was great for its time if you could pay for it, but it is definitely not a competitor anymore.
Git LFS has been just fine for multiterabyte repositories for years.
p4 is still great, that there are workarounds to be usable on similar workloads on git doesn't takeaway p4s inherent advantages. they're two very different tools.
Thank you, that phrases it much better than I could. They are very different tools(although I hear good stuff about P4 Fusion).
Now if someone wanted to make an open source P4 replacement that would be a neat thing.
P4 is fine on paper. I just wish the the client didn't crash and the server didn't lock up as often as it does. P4V is a mess.