ClearCase WTF



  • ClearCase is a WTF. Discuss...

    I have to update 20 times in the UI before a real update job starts... I am ready to strangle clearcase, even if it is just a program!



  • Hey, I have an idea. How about you explain WTF ClearCase is or provide a link or something?

    The rest of us cannot see inside your coconut.



  • If you're talking revision control ... I have to use RCS. I must check in each file I change individually. WTF? 



  •  I saw a computer with a clear case and I thought it looked pretty cool.

     

     



  •  When you say "update", you're not doing something crazy like running it on Windows with a "snapshot" view, are you?  Use the dynamic view option if you can.  Mounts the vob as a remote filesystem so you don't have to worry about whether or not it's already updated.

    But yes, clearcase is a real WTF, especially for Windows. 



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    Hey, I have an idea. How about you explain WTF ClearCase is or provide a link or something?

    The rest of us cannot see inside your coconut.

     

     

    http://www.google.ca/search?q=ClearCase&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a



  • 5 point for someone who can find an IT-subject known by more than 100 people that's not on Wikipedia.



  • @mxsscott said:

    I have to use RCS. I must check in each file I change individually. WTF? 
     

    Ouch. I'm so sorry. This reminded me of having to use Team Coherence, an equally awful revision control system. I had to manually 'lock' files before working on them, or it would barf all over the place, as well as a whole bunch of other non-features. Fortunately this is only dark memory, since the project switched to SVN before it got too unbearable.



  • I vote for Serena Dimensions to be the worst revision control system on the planet. Had to work with it for two years, hated its guts. Used CVS before and loved it.

    1. Have to check out and specify a given change request for every file.
    2. interweaving changes for different change requests on the same file would simply not work (do change A on file X, do change B on file X, fix bug in change A on file X <== Uh-oh, can't do, have to  create a "bugfix change for A" first to be able to do that. We ended up in creating a "changes for next release" change request and doing all source changes and that change request.
    3. Synchronizing projects to the latest revisions is a drag. It requires clicking away dozens of dialog boxes ("files updated:", "files added:", "files deleted:", "files updated on both sides" -- for every workspace project)
    4. Terrible performance: Checking out a single file could take up to 40 seconds.
    Some of these things could probably be attributed to a bad implementation on the site. But anyway: All the developers hate the guts of that tool.


  • @dtech said:

    5 point for someone who can find an IT-subject known by more than 100 people that's not on Wikipedia.
     

    Pragmatic Programming. There is only a stub for the book, but not for the method (or philosophy or however you call it) .



  • @dtech said:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearcase

    Oh Jesus, it's from Rational..   I don't even have to use it to know that diklikhten is right. 



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Oh Jesus, it's from Rational..   I don't even have to use it to know that diklikhten is right.

    laughs I did a double-take on that one.



  • @Tuuli Mustasydan said:

     I saw a computer with a clear case and I thought it looked pretty cool.

     

     

    This is actually what I thought the WTF was going to be about when I clicked the sidebar link.  Maybe someone running a machine with a live hampster in its plexi cage or something. 



  • @mxsscott said:

    If you're talking revision control ... I have to use RCS. I must check in each file I change individually. WTF? 

    Years ago, I had to use a 16-bit DOS-based VCS which enforced strict locking and lacked an automatic merge feature. (Our dev boxes were Win95/98 at the time). Whenever 2 people on the same project wanted to work on a file, one person had to create a branch on the file to avoid conflicts.  When we were finished, the guy who had branched was required to manually merge the changes back to the dev branch using WinDiff or something similar.

    Good times. 



  • @TheRider said:

    interweaving changes for different change requests on the same file would simply not work

    There are revision control systems that allow that? I've an average of 5 perforce clients just so I can work on multiple problems that just happen to hit the same dozen or so files.

    But then, I can go on for ages on how using files as the atomic unit of code is a massive wtf - I used to work on Smalltalk, where the atomic unit of code is the method, and changes to different methods in the same class did not cause any sort of merge issue whatsoever. Is there any diff software out there that can cope with moving a method to a different place in the file? Or even worse, moving it and later renaming it?



  • Let me guess - PVCS?



  • @AlienMushroom said:



     

    Wow! No way! How did you do that!?



  • @AbbydonKrafts said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    Oh Jesus, it's from Rational..   I don't even have to use it to know that diklikhten is right.

    laughs I did a double-take on that one.

     

    Yoiu know how version control is suposed to be useful? Well theres a "hickup" ClearCase has every once it a while where it loses a file. It knows it lost it but it cannot recover. The only way to recover is to manually create a file with the same name in the appropriate directory, check it out, then undo the checkout and hope ClearCase can find the file again...

    Also ClearCase plugins for eclipse randomly cause eclipse to crash.

    Its ok, we have been migrating to SVN for 1/2 a year now so any month now I might have the option of considering to file paperwork to request to work with SVN.



  • Ah, ClearCase...

    The problem with ClearCase is that while you might think you're buying a revision control system, what you're really buying is a box of parts that can be assembled into a version control system. They should be required by law to put "some assembly required" on all their advertising and packaging. Without a full-time employee (or highly-paid consultant) to manage the thing, and to write scripts to hide the esoterica, you're just going to be lost in the woods without a guide.

    You can do some pretty neat things with ClearCase, and it can be endlessly configured to match whatever version control paradigm you want to follow (exclusive edit, branch-on-edit, optimistic editing). It doesn't do any of these things as configured from the factory, though.



  • @mbessey said:

    The problem with ClearCase is that while you might think you're buying a revision control system, what you're really buying is a box of parts that can be assembled into a version control system. They should be required by law to put "some assembly required" on all their advertising and packaging. Without a full-time employee (or highly-paid consultant) to manage the thing, and to write scripts to hide the esoterica, you're just going to be lost in the woods without a guide.

    You can do some pretty neat things with ClearCase, and it can be endlessly configured to match whatever version control paradigm you want to follow (exclusive edit, branch-on-edit, optimistic editing). It doesn't do any of these things as configured from the factory, though.

     

    No, I don't care about maintenance. If you are a reasonably-intelligent manager of things, you would have 1 full-time employee dedicated to source control (at least partial time) to setting it up, maintenance, problems devs have, etc... We have noone left who understands CC or how it was set up. Still NOT AN ISSUE for me since that comes with any source control. Collabnet just provides a all-in-one solution for subversion...

    Now having said that the TortoiseSVN(ui to svn) has 1/10000th the problems ClearCase UI has (at least that I've experienced). Also SVN command line tools are 100x easier to use. This is from the developer's perspective. Clearcase does have some nifty features, but they are dwarfed by the clearcase gotchas and "don't do that or you are fucked"s... Has anyone ever used ClearCase Explorer using a non-lan connection with the clearcase server? Every click takes 1 minute to work, and I don't mean updating, I mean right-clicking or going into a directory. Also SVN has a GOOD eclipse plugin that does not crash every1-5 hrs (annoying since eclipse saves the workspace only during a "successful" close).

     


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