I'm sorry, people were doing what?
@remmy @0xabad1dea Piper is Google's internal clone/rewrite of Perforce using its own infrastructure. They have a single monorepo called google3 that stores almost all of the source code for the entire company's products. I don't know how many engineers that is nowadays, but certainly O(10,000s) all using one repo. To make any change you create a "changelist", kind of like a PR in Git terms. Changelists are assigned as a monotonically increasing quantity. So when the company would get close to some significant epoch like "changelist #100000000" a bunch of engineers would all run shell scripts creating hundreds of new changelists to get the nerd cred of being the one to create that one special changelist number.
@fraggle @remmy @0xabad1dea One time back in the late-80's/early-90's it was my job to config and admin a P4 SVCS for internal use. For a DOS/Win3.1 app.
And I miss simple "change-lists".
I'm sure there are people competing for CI/CD build number magic, burning cycles in some DC.
But it is stunning that Google is using P4-like SVCS.
Edited 16h ago
@jab01701mid @remmy @0xabad1dea if you ever use or have used Gerrit, its strange workflow might make more sense when you look at it through this lens. It's basically reproducing the Google internal Piper/Perforce workflow on top of Git