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0 pointsmaccard9d ago0 comments

> The 10k tutorials on git might indicate issues with its design, or it might indicate its massive popularity. Hard to say.

It's "hard to say" if you want to ignore the fact that it requires 10k tutorials. Meanwhile, there are 500+ person companies with non technical users using P4 with literally 0 onboarding other than "by the way, undo is broken don't use it".

> I just remember that learning to use P4 required learning a ton of concepts for what P4 thinks your workflow ought to be; learning git has largely just required a simple 1:1 mapping between git commands and the things I do with VCS 98% of the time.

Using P4 is: Download P4V, install plugin for $EDITOR, and double click on a changelist to submit.

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PaulDavisThe1st9d ago· 2 in thread

the fact that 10k tutorials exist says way more about the human urge to write, document, and share information than git itself. the 10k number is also a made up statistic. It might be 2k, it might be 20k. i use git daily and often fairly intensively, and i've read perhaps 5-10 tutorials, so the idea that "git requires 10k tutorials" just doesn't make any sense.

if anything, the fact that something with good search-fu might find a tutorial more specifically catering to their background and needs seems like a huge plus for git.

> Using P4 is: Download P4V, install plugin for $EDITOR, and double click on a changelist to submit.

"a changelist" ... "what the hell is that? I've been editing my files, I don't have "a changelist"."

and anyway, joining a company that's already using P4 is never, ever going to be that simple (even if it was actually that simple as the first user, which I question)

59nadir9d ago

Honestly, when our backend team merged into one that was using Perforce for the backend learning how to use Perforce wasn't realistically even a blip on the radar of what to get used to. I was against it at the time for what we were doing but with the benefit of hindsight I can say that I prefer something like Perforce if someone can manage it for me, or it's a set-and-forget type situation; I don't personally have a lot of use for the distributed part of DVCS.

Currently I use Fossil for most projects, but it's not a compelling choice (just like git) for when you have binary stuff. You've got `fossil uv` for unversioned files, but I think I would rather just sidestep the entire problem with a better versioning model than what we've settled on for text files.

maccardOP8d ago

> Honestly, when our backend team merged into one that was using Perforce for the backend learning how to use Perforce wasn't realistically even a blip on the radar of what to get used to.

I think a lot of what people are assuming here is that because git has such a steep learning curve, P4 does too. You can literally ignore all of the concepts that P4 has and still muddle your way into getting things updated.

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