
Perforce introduces GitSwarm - wdding
http://www.perforce.com/gitswarm
======
Roboprog
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.

~~~
dahart
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, but personally, I'm open to the possibility
they have some value added.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
> 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?

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

~~~
kazinator
To continue digging previous history:

    
    
       git blame <sha>^ -- file.c
    

Where <sha> is the hash of the commit where the spelling mistake was made,
pulled from the original blame from HEAD.

Though I don't use such stuff, I would be surprised if there wasn't IDE
support to make this "deeper dig" more of a point and click operation.

~~~
vetrom
There is, try `git gui blame`.

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baconner
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 these systems really unsticks
the problem.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> 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?

~~~
sytse
I would love to know as well. We offer GitLab Enterprise Edition so our naming
already is compatible.

~~~
baconner
Ha well you got the name right, yes. Sadly there's a bit more to it to sell to
an enterprise software consumer - here just fill out this 30 page rfp...

Anyway serious answer in parent.

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theonewolf
Update: They do cite GitLab. Now I guess my confusion as a GitLab user is they
don't sell me on what is new/differentiate their customized offering.

This product looks like a poorly rebranded GitLab.

Why don't they cite GitLab as the front-end web application/real workhorse
here?

~~~
migkatr
They do, "GitSwarm is where developer preferences meet enterprise needs. Based
on the popular GitLab collaboration suite ..."

~~~
theonewolf
I see. I understand the problem they're solving now.

Bringing Git + more agile development flows into the Enterprise.

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jscahefer
Lets take it as a given that you are excited about becoming a poweruser of the
perforce ecosystem (hey, if my complany chose this tool, the least I can do is
understand it very, very well), documentation resources are lacking I.M.O.

very few up to date third party books, the video tutorials hang while you
watch them, the documentation instructs you to press buttons that simply
aren't there in the GUI. with no alternates give.

we paid for professional training and the answer given in the meeting was
"experiment and see how it's working".

Uh, really?

~~~
twk3
We recently heard that we were giving out links to GitLab's documentation
instead of our own, (which we didn't have up on our website at the time.) We
have since thrown them up here:
[http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/gitswar...](http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/gitswarm/)

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mixologic
What got my attention was the "narrow cloning for greater security". Im
_really_ curious how they are managing to implement narrow cloning with git.

~~~
mataway
Community manager from Perforce here. Basically it's what Sytse said; we do
bi-directional replication between a p4 server and a git repo. You can carve
off any hunk of a p4 server and surface it as a git repo. What we've seen some
people do is push a monorepo into a p4 server and then carve off smaller repos
that are more tightly scoped. Everything still goes back into p4 though, so
you can still get the benefits of a mono repo.

The neat thing is that multiple git repos can consume the same pieces of a p4
server making code sharing between git repos seamless.

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vermooten
too little too late

But I do feel sorry for the telesales guy who is forced to call me every 6
months to see if I want to use Perforce.

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dr_win
Couldn't even finish watching the intro video because of annoying voice-over.
I'm probably not the target audience.

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CameronBanga
I really don't get the value-add here? Everything looks like stock GitLab?

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solomatov
Can't see the video because they use flash. So enterprisey.

