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Comment by iso1631 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what percentage of people on HN have ever used subversion or cvs, let alone older systems.

I remember the days of NT4 and the guy that would lock a file, leave for the day and you couldn't check it out :D Good times!

Same year I deleted all our customer's websites by simply dragging the hosting folder somewhere into C:\programs or something by mistake... A double click + lag turned into a drag and drop! Whoops!

I was pale as a ghost as I asked for the zip drive.

We had to reboot the file server first, which we did a swift kick to the power button.

At least today we employ very secure mechanisms; like YAML rollouts of config, to keep things interesting.

CVS was released in 1990. Subversion was released in 2000.

Google still uses a clone of Perforce internally (and various wrappers of it). Perforce was released in 1995.

Perforce is standard in gamedev currently. As a programmer first and foremost, I prefer git but I've certainly come to appreciate the advantages of Perforce and it's an overall better fit for (bigger) game projects.

Does it do better handling of larger files, like game assets?

Yes, Perforce handles large files, and large folders of files, very well. It's quite efficient with deltas in binary files. It's also very useful that Perforce expects clients to check out only a part of the depot. There are folders with raw assets like uncompressed sound, layered graphics and all that, I don't check out any of that, I only check out the necessary in-engine assets.

For code, I prefer git as I said, but in a game's depot most files are not code, and Perforce is built around handling those other assets well.

Yes. And other game development tools integrate Perforce better than Git. File level security is another advantage.

I'm still using subversion as it servers solo developer needs perfectly.

Only if you don't branch often. The way I code, I branch for every feature or bugfix. Even on my personal projects.

If you're just doing an edit on main and push changes, git can do that fine just as well as svn, but no need to run a specific server on your laptop either, and in a client/server basis back to your home pi you just use standard ssh rather than running a special server.

I remember moving from SCCS to RCS because it was considered superior.

I work on a project that we started in CVS, then moved to Perforce, and now on git. With full, intact history.

sccs, I was using it as late as the 90s.

But the percentage is probably small, yes.

Sun used SCCS until they moved to Mercurial in the early 2000s.

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