I was there when "Walkabout" started being bandied about. It irked me to no end that I could jump through all of the hoops and finally get behind the NDA curtain by being hired and then be told "nope, you can't hear about that". That was a severe jolt to the internal culture of the whole company.
There had been other projects which had been kept under wraps successfully. Chrome and V8 were demoed in Seville long before anyone on the outside heard about it. They said keep it quiet, and we did. Google TV had been knowable for ages before it went anywhere externally. There was no reason to think someone would leak Wave.
Instead, they started playing the "we're special and you are not" card, and that started a sense of resentment growing. Not even the infrastructure teams which were going to provide services to them were let in on what was really going to happen in there.
Then after far too long, demo day of Wave arrived. I only stayed long enough to see them hit backspace and have it echo out to everyone else who was connected. I remember my exact comment at the time: "packets". As in, lots and lots and lots of packets flying around to generate RPCs for all of those deltas. Then those turn into XML or whatever going out to web browser clients, and ... yeah. SO many packets. That right there worried me greatly.
So then I see this thing about it not scaling properly and choking JVMs and suddenly it all makes sense.
Oh well. All of the secret code depots and restricted access areas must have been practice for what is now happening with Plus. Entire floors of buildings you can't open as a full-time employee? Yep. More code depots being locked down? Yep.
Just like I used to tell candidates when they asked if we used Solaris, or Windows, or whatever you can think of: if you can think of a technology, the place is big enough to where there's probably an install of it somewhere.
Along those lines, I doubt there's one of anything in there any more. It's just too big.
"Crazy" is probably the wrong word for me to use (I have been known for my hyperbole in speech). What I meant was that, from my point of view, having multiple depots is almost the same as having multiple directories at the root of a single depot. The Perforce Support article you linked to says the same thing.
Hence, I feel that having multiple depots on one Perforce server simply eats up client names and causes confusion among those who haven't learned the distinction between "depot" and "server".
There had been other projects which had been kept under wraps successfully. Chrome and V8 were demoed in Seville long before anyone on the outside heard about it. They said keep it quiet, and we did. Google TV had been knowable for ages before it went anywhere externally. There was no reason to think someone would leak Wave.
Instead, they started playing the "we're special and you are not" card, and that started a sense of resentment growing. Not even the infrastructure teams which were going to provide services to them were let in on what was really going to happen in there.
Then after far too long, demo day of Wave arrived. I only stayed long enough to see them hit backspace and have it echo out to everyone else who was connected. I remember my exact comment at the time: "packets". As in, lots and lots and lots of packets flying around to generate RPCs for all of those deltas. Then those turn into XML or whatever going out to web browser clients, and ... yeah. SO many packets. That right there worried me greatly.
So then I see this thing about it not scaling properly and choking JVMs and suddenly it all makes sense.
Oh well. All of the secret code depots and restricted access areas must have been practice for what is now happening with Plus. Entire floors of buildings you can't open as a full-time employee? Yep. More code depots being locked down? Yep.