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Re: Comparison with Clearcase Lite

From: Ted Dennison <dennison_at_ssd.fsi.com>
Date: 2006-10-06 18:05:08 CEST

Steve.Nelson@uk.delarue.com wrote:
> I'm not familiar with this product, but if anyone has experience, or can
> offer help with a comparison and ammunition for SVM advocacy, I'd much
> appreciate it.
>
I don't see a torrent of useful info here, so I'll tell you what little
I know, even though its probably dated.

I worked on a project that used ClearCase about 5 years ago. I'm
unfamiliar with the "lite" version. The main drawbacks with it that I
remember centered around the way it implemented its repository.
ClearCase essentially takes over a partition on a hard drive with its
own filesystem. Its a neat idea, but it causes problems. For instance, a
lot of standard OS tools (eg: backup software) don't work properly with
it. Mass operations on files from the ClearCase filesystem (eg: large
checkins) would often fail with some bogus file permission error partway
through, and had to be redone with the successful operations edited out
somehow (process iterated until everything is taken care of). Writing
scripts to detect and handle this is a nice little exercise in Computer
Science, but I suspect most managers would rather their developers spend
their time on other things. Our repository would periodically (6 months
to a year I think) get hosed to the point where our ClearCase Admin had
to take it down and repair it, so it wasn't exactly a paragon of
reliability.

It wasn't easy to figure out how to administer. We had the best senior
engineer in the company on this task; a guy with an EE degree from MIT.
He had to go off to a Rational training course to learn how to do the
Admin stuff. He couldn't figure out how to do it without the training.
Being a mere mortal with no classes myself, I could barely manage to
figure out to install and license the dang thing. I have done stuff like
build the svn API from its directions, which requires downloading
several ancillary packages and following their directions, so I'm not a
total moron either (OK, my wife might disagree...).

As a user I actually liked ClearCase. However, it was massively
expensive, which is why we eventually switched to SourceSafe. Presumably
"Lite" is priced better.

While looking for information on this "Lite" thing, I found a comparison
thread on the perforce mailing list. Perhaps it will help some:
http://maillist.perforce.com/pipermail/perforce-user/2001-January/thread.html#5234

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Received on Fri Oct 6 18:06:01 2006

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