How Google Uses Linux[2009]

lwn.net

39 points·pook··4 comments

Open articleView on HN

Semi-related: a video of Linus giving a talk on Git at Google http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

Watch for the bit where he goes:

"What are you guys using?

pause

Perforce?

longer pause

I'm ... sorry."

Take that with a grain of salt.

Linus is snug as a bug in a rug, having solved his own problem of dealing with e-mailed patches. This also works for many coders with similar work-flows.

But, for work-flows with binaries (documents, images, executables, etc.) Perforce looks better, if you read through the comments in the LWN piece. For instance:

[git, problems with binaries] this has been documented several times, but it seems to be in the category of 'interesting problem, we should do something about that someday, but not a priority' right now

P.S. a couple of months ago, in another HN discussion, stevelosh kindly contributed a link about the bfiles extension for Mercurial: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/BfilesExtension

The article above talks about Google's work on the Linux kernel, something that is managed competently with Git outside of the company.

Granted, Linus's comment is a sweeping statement (as most snarky comments tend to be) but in this context, Perforce seems woefully inadequate for managing Google's kernel work.

So far Linux is still the best for server storage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com