Source Depot's largest disadvantage VS git how hard it is to share changes with others.
But I miss the ability to only pull down a portion of a monorepo, and the ability to remap where folders are at, or to pull down a single folder into multiple locations.
So much bullshit in with monorepos in Git land exists because Git doesn't support things that Source Depot (and Perforce I presume) supported decades ago.
As an aside for those who don't know what I am talking about, when pulling down a repo in source depot you can specify which directories to pull down locally, and you can also remap directories to a different path. This is super useful for header files, or any other sort of shared dependency. Instead of making the build system get all funky and fancy, the source control system handled putting files into expected locations.
So imagine a large monorepo for a company and you can have some shared CSS styles that exist and they always end up in every projects `styles` folder or what have you.
Or the repo keeps all shared styles in a single place, and you can then import them into your project, but instead of build system bullshit you just go to your mappings and tell it to pull the proper files put them into a sub-directory of your project.
It is a really damn nice to have feature. (That also got misused a ton...)
> But I miss the ability to only pull down a portion of a monorepo, and the ability to remap where folders are at, or to pull down a single folder into multiple locations.
We have all that with git in Microsoft though. We don't check out the entire office monorepo - only the parts relevant to what you're working on (Excel in my case).
Also sharing stuff in SourceDepot wasn't the bad part (you get links to changelists and those open in a desktop program). The bad part was the branching model, commits, no real/good CI (we had a commit queue) etc). SourceDepot was just overall a bad scm for us.
Ehhh can’t say I’m a fan of folder remapping. It gets a little too auto-magical and since all tools access the file system directly different users can see different things. That’s just begging for bugs and “works on my machine”.
I’m moderately confident the correct path is monorepo + centralization + virtual filesystem. Not every tool plays nice with VFS but at this point most do.
The D in DVCS is almost entirely a waste. Source control systems should, imho, trivially support petabytes of history and terabyte scale clones.
I haven't seen a virtual filesystem overlaid on top of a monorepo before, do you have any examples of what that looks like?
Semi-related, I try to use symlink shenanigans in git to share common files between monorepo projects w/o using 3rd party tooling, but my latest attempt worked on Windows but the symlink fell apart when the repo was pulled down on a Mac!
Tell me more. When is the D relevant? When is it super critical?
Working offline is distinct from distributed. In practice almost all development is defacto centralized on GitHub (or other central host).
> In software development, distributed version control (also known as distributed revision control) is a form of version control in which the complete codebase, including its full history, is mirrored on every developer's computer.
That’s a super mega anti-feature to me. Git still sucks for large binary files which is an insane limitation.
Yes, most development is de-facto centralized on GitHub/GitLab/SourceHut/BitBucket/etc.
The Linux kernel is not, and Git was designed by the creator of the Linux kernel to serve the needs of the Linux kernel developer community. And I am certain they are not the only ones with that workflow.
Git makes fundamental design choices that are (maybe possibly but not necessarily) good for the Linux kernel. They’re objectively bad and problematic for the majority of dev work. Which makes it really fucking shitty that the industry standardized on a tool that is bad for standard workflows.
Perforce's support for that is not great these days. They don't support it in streams, and honestly if you're not using streams in p4 these days you're doing it wrong.
But I miss the ability to only pull down a portion of a monorepo, and the ability to remap where folders are at, or to pull down a single folder into multiple locations.
So much bullshit in with monorepos in Git land exists because Git doesn't support things that Source Depot (and Perforce I presume) supported decades ago.
As an aside for those who don't know what I am talking about, when pulling down a repo in source depot you can specify which directories to pull down locally, and you can also remap directories to a different path. This is super useful for header files, or any other sort of shared dependency. Instead of making the build system get all funky and fancy, the source control system handled putting files into expected locations.
So imagine a large monorepo for a company and you can have some shared CSS styles that exist and they always end up in every projects `styles` folder or what have you.
Or the repo keeps all shared styles in a single place, and you can then import them into your project, but instead of build system bullshit you just go to your mappings and tell it to pull the proper files put them into a sub-directory of your project.
It is a really damn nice to have feature. (That also got misused a ton...)