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Comment by samhw | Hacker News Reader

> there is something about this letter

It's the self-importance of a company which I only just realised isn't just a GitHub repo somehow thinking they need to write a letter longer than Kurt Cobain's suicide note to tell me that they got acquired by some other bland-as-fuck open-core company.

All we needed to hear was:

> Hi, I'm the CEO of Puppet. Yeah, that thing you use to do stuff in Chrome with code. Yeah, yeah, we're a company, yup, somehow. Anyway: we're getting acquired by this other company. They're called Perforce. No, you don't know them either. Yeah, they also have some indecipherable enterprise website with some Gartner Quadrant bollocks on it. No, you don't really need to know any of this.

Edit: Fuck, that's Puppeteer. OK, I just have no idea what this company does. Oh well.

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Puppet is one of the DevOps configuration languages. IIRC it had mostly "won" against Chef, and subsequently "lost" against Ansible.

Perforce is basically Git, but shittier and proprietary. I think it's mostly popular in the games industry.

Interesting. My recollection is that Chef and Ansible both completely ran roughshod over Puppet, and that Puppet is now in the "antiquated tools that used to be relevant" bucket.

Anecdotal, yeah. But DevOps is my daily work, and I like to think I keep an eye on the tools ecosystem.

That was my sense too back than, Puppet had early traction, but lost out to Chef, and then Ansible turned out to be the marathoner of the 3.

Seems like doing $100M+ in ARR (as hinted in the article) is a win. Even more because Chef was acquired for $220M. I think Perforce will pay a bit more for Puppet.

Their last round in 2020 ($40M from Black Round) was debt financing, not investment. That to me is generally a sign of a struggling company. And when the CEO of such a company claims they were looking for other companies to acquire, it raises a number of questions.

Back in the day (~10 years ago?) when the company I worked for was looking at replacing our internal custom provisioning and desired state configuration tooling it was Ansible that won out. We were running a mixed fleet of Windows and Linux hosts - the company was an ISP and shared hoster.

At that point in time both Puppet and Chef needed agents to be installed on your servers and we really didn't want to have to manage another background service running on hundreds to thousands of boxes. Ansible didn't have this requirement.

Also Windows support was pretty sketchy on Chef and Puppet back then, to the point of being almost studiously ignored, Ansible provided remote PowerShell support. And that was primarily the deciding factor.

I used Puppet around 2012. I remember looking at Ansible, and immediately seeing that its agentless, SSH-based approach was highly preferable. But every time i discussed it with the devops experts in and contracted to our company, they assured me that agentless was terrible, and had too many disadvantages, and couldn't scale.

And yet, here we are. Puppet grew an agentless mode, and then lost anyway. My former company's deep investment in integrating Puppet and MCollective into our infrastructure tooling must look increasingly like a millstone. Oh well, it was all interesting to work on.

The shorthand at the time--don't know how accurate--was that sysadmins tended to prefer Puppet and devs tended to prefer Chef. But, yes, I remember from attending Config mgmt camp a few times during the period that Ansible was really spiking in popularity. From what I saw, Ansible was easier to get started with and probably more appropriate for more general IT automation tasks.

It's popular in the gaming industry because it handles large individual assets better than anything out there.

Hence the invention of things like Git LFS:

https://git-lfs.github.com/

Great summary! This should have been in the FAQ

Thanks for the no-bullshit explanation - much appreciated! That letter makes me think approximately the same thing I think to myself when someone tells me their sister got married: like, "hmm, I'm not really sure why you're telling me this, but good for them I guess."

Perforce is probably more widespread than people realise, and not just games industry although they've focused more on the benefits they bring to that field in recent years. Perforce were offering a good quality version control system for years before the initial release of git, as a result it can still be found in many older companies who have projects that are older than git itself and haven't migrated.

Git has obviously won the VCS battle now in most fields, but version control used to be a much more diverse and interesting space; I'd used Perforce, SVN and Mercurial professionally before git just won out most places.

> Perforce is basically Git, but shittier and proprietary. I think it's mostly popular in the games industry.

I think Google also uses Perforce. It's understandable because Google started before git.

They don't, though they used to long ago.

https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-st...

Perforce is "Git for people who don't want to merge a 200MB binary FBX asset". Their core value proposition is more like SVN or Microsoft's Version Control in that people check out a file and then only they are allowed to modify it until they check it back in. That way, merges can be avoided.

And yes, it's very popular in the games industry, because even Git+LFS is very painful if you have merge conflicts.

p4 was known to handle large binary blobs well, vs most of the other vcss.

While I agree with you, Perforce is not open-core at all, in fact, they're are fully closed-source[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perforce#Helix_Core

Ah, fair enough. I suppose I should offer an explicit disclaimer: my descriptions of both companies aren't necessarily 100% accurate, haha.

While the Helix Core Server itself is not Open Source, much of the surrounding tooling is. E.g., see the code here: https://swarm.workshop.perforce.com/user/perforce_software I don't think it'd be fair to say it's "fully" closed-source.

How has nobody heard of Perforce. It was the SCM of choice for a lot of companies until git came along. Doesn't Google still use it?

BTW, Perforce's diffing/merging tools [0] are fantastic.

[0] https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core-apps/merge-diff...

i thought google used mercurial (hg) ?

They were on Perforce for a long time.

See e.g. https://info.perforce.com/rs/perforce/images/GoogleWhitePape... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889958.

Facebook uses Mercurial for its big monorepo. Google’s big monorepo was once P4 but isn’t anymore.

Amazon was P4 when I was there (a long, long time ago).

I heard that more recently they were still trying to get off of it.

Last time I used Perforce, more than a decade ago, the visual diff app was fantastic and all other aspects were total shit. Would rather use Subversion if someone insisted on not using git.

Instead of ranting about how much I am annoyed by this problem, let me just ask: Are there any good diff tools/algorithms that don't consistently freak out when you change the indentation of a block of code? Yes, diff tools like to go by unique/common lines, and yes, those two } are technically the only common line in this chunk, but that is beyond useless when all you did was wrap something in an if/else.

(And yes, P4V tools have "ignore all white space" - which is a great way to produce a completely useless merge result, in my experience. If you can tune out of nonsensical indentation in one side of the comparison, it's at least passable for diffing.)

There are starting to be more code-aware diff tools.

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

I'm currently trying this out, but I'm not sure if I'll keep using it.

Rational only stored the diffs between two decorated abstract syntax trees. So you got as-you-like it pretty printing, no conflicts on formatting, just everything you ever dreamed of. In 1987.

Google has something that acts sort of like it with a bit of modernisation, but it's not actually Perforce any more (it's called Piper, there's some info out there). They out-scaled Perforce some years back.

I don't think Perforce is open core. It's open plugin, aka Embrace Extend, Extinguish.

Anyway, emotions aside, it's an important company with a product used by important companies.

Could you give an example of where it has Embraced->Extinguished?

> Yeah, that thing you use to do stuff in Chrome with code.

In where?

I'm not sure I can parse this question successfully... But, in case this happens to answer your question, it was Puppeteer I had in mind (like I mentioned in the edit).

I meant why Chrome? When I used Puppet, it was in terminal and in git to edit stuff. Parsing is easy, use keyword in.

Puppeteer is an automation library to remote control Chrome.

The parent poster had confused Puppet (the deployment automation software) and Puppeteer (the chrome remote control software).

Yup, in answer to the guy above: this is correct. Thanks for clarifying for me! (Some day HN will figure out notifications and I’ll be able to reply to comments myself within 24 hours...)

Ahh, got it, Puppeteer! Checking out

Nice! And I’m not a web engineer so I’m not really au fait with Puppeteer - but fingers crossed it’s useful to you. (I simply hadn’t heard of Puppet at all, so Puppeteer seemingly came into my head first.)

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