

Ask HN: Is Git an appropriate SCM for large enterprise software companies? - ghshephard

All of the large companies that I've worked at in the past 10+ years have eventually transitioned their SCM into either Clearcase or Perforce (usually Perforce).<p>The engineering VPs who make these decisions are pretty smart, and have a lot of exposure to SCMs, and are not unfamiliar with the advantages of DVCS.<p>Recently, a colleague took over a engineering management position at a smaller (300 employee) company that had decided to try and use git as their SCM.  They currently have seven build engineers w/25 software developers, a ratio that is severely out of whack (My current org managed to get up to 100 developers with just a single build engineer).  What's worse, is that when this manager asked to branch the tree, he got some pushback - the effort was not insignificant.<p>Git seems to work well when you have a small number of branches moving forward (linux kernel), but, for enterprises where you might have dozens of long-lived branches, each of which needs collections of fixes checked into all the branches - Perforce/Clearcase seem to be a better tool for the job.<p>Anybody else have a different experience?
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jtchang
I've used both git and Clearcase in a large software company.

The reason you'd go with Clearcase is for the tools and support. I personally
think git is easier to work with but clearcase really worked well when your
repositories got really large (250GB+) and you had long lived branches with
customers needing specific fixes.

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Rantenki
Although if you have 250GB+ of stuff in your repo, it might indicate more than
just source files are getting checked in. An artifact management system might
make sense.

<http://archiva.apache.org/> is one example.

As an aside, I have had trouble with dll checkins from some of my developers,
and git filter-branch worked wonders, but that's probably a bit off-topic.

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cmccabe
You can't use git by itself to manage a large set of projects. Android uses
Gerrit for this. Git doesn't do well if you have lots of large binary assets,
but unless you're a game company you shouldn't have that problem.

Perforce is not a bad SCM. Clearcase is, though.

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kemmer
Yes. Next question?

