[buug] OT: Rational Clear Case?

[Stefan Lasiewski]

I used Clearcase in an office of 15-20 developers from
2000-2002. This was Clearcase 4.x, running on Solaris
8 & 7 machines (maybe a few RedHat machines). I
haven't used it since.

The good:
- Great automatic merging ability, which saved time &
effort when it worked.

- You can version text files, symlinks, directories
and many binary files-- jpegs, Word documents, etc.
Clearcase stores the delta of the file, so you're not
storing redundant data over & over.

- Clearcase has a nice file system which looks and
feels like a regular Unix filesystem but has some
really nifty features. You can browse to any version
of a element with 'filename.c@@/versionnumber' and
apply any Unix tool to that element.

The bad:
- Clearase is very complex -- many places, even small
shops, have a dedicated Clearcase administrator to
take care of the exceptions. Version control shouldn't
be rocket science. I'm not sure we ever managed it
correctly...

- Clearacase had more features and processes then we
could handle as a small shop. Clearcase LT (The
'lightweight' version) was too limited for our use.
We didn't use Rational's Unified Change Management
(UCM) because it seemed too process heavy.

- Very expensive. The guess of $5000/seat license
probably isn't far off the mark. During the dotcom
boom, know of two 100-employee companies (40
developers) who paid $1 million for package containing
Clearcase, Rational Rose and some other tools.

- Their atomic commits weren't always atomic.
Sometimes the checkin would fail, and some elements
made it into the repository while other elements
failed.

- There were some very obscure bugs in Clearcase 4. 
For example, when removing (or adding) elements,
Clearcase normally removes (or adds) the data, the
file name and links to the file name from the
repository. But several times a week, Clearcase failed
to remove one of these things-- leaving you with
references to your non-existing element all over the
place.

-= Stefan


--- Brian Sobolak <brian at planetshwoop.com> wrote:
> 
> Has anybody here used IBM (nee Rational) ClearCase
> product?  I'm
> interested in personal opinions about it from actual
> users.
> 
> (Yes, I have read the Linuxmafia FAQ)
> 
> brian
> 
> --
> Brian Sobolak
> http://www.planetshwoop.com/
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