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From what I understand, Piper is not a fork of Perforce, but instead a completely different system with the same interface. You know, built on top of a BigTable or Spanner cluster instead of whatever Perforce uses.

The Mercurial extensions are then an alternative client for Piper.

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It's my understanding that it started as a fork of perforce, Google bought a source license for perforce. Whether you'd still call a fork of perforce anymore is like asking if a Computer is the same computer after you've replaced all the components over the years.

That was the case many years ago (extremely customized perforce server), but after that there was a full rewrite as a distributed system built on Bigtable etc. - https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor... is an overview. It wasn't a ship-of-Theseus type situation where they incrementally replaced components.

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