in reply to What's your prefered revision control system?

Where I worked, we used clearcase. This is a nifty tool, more advanced than cvs. It allows locks, branches, etc.. . We wrote an entire packaging tool based on it. It looks like an ordinary filesystem, where you can go into using standard unix shells (and use cd, ls, vi).

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Dr. Mark Ceulemans
Senior Consultant
BMC, Belgium
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Re^2: What's your prefered revision control system?
by allyc (Scribe) on Oct 01, 2004 at 22:18 UTC
    I work in a configuration management section for a large government IT contract in the UK. We use PVCS Dimensions and Clearcase, and unfortunately its my job to administrate both systems.

    They both have very good points... they also can be a nightmare!

    Clearcase is a pain to administer, and when it goes wrong (which is quite allot with the amount of developers using it in our place) it can be hard to work out what’s wrong.. and even harder to fix it! Also there is very little security in ClearCase.. unless you buy bolt ons from other companies.

    Dimensions is a good and reliable tool.. but its not as flexible as clearcase. The good thing is that they both keep me in a job :o)

    Al

[reply]
      Somehow, (and I should whip myself for it), I forgot about the total lack of security in Clearcase. Someday there will be a Windows-worm that contains an optional Clearcase vector that either corrupts files or replaces executable content (and/or makefiles), and it will decimate companies it gets inside. Open network shares and I can edit anyone's files on the network. *Not* cool.

      I suppose it hasn't stung me yet, but unless Clearcase is forced on you, that's reason enough to avoid it. (But anyway, other than the leaking airplane gas tank (please ignore that gaping hole in the wing!), it flies well enough).

[reply]
        SI, I think your criticisms of ClearCase are entirely unfair and undeserved. It is entirely inaccurate to say that ClearCase has a "total lack of security". On Unix, it uses Unix security, which is pretty good. On Windows, it re-implements a Unix-like security model (owner/group/world). In my experience, this security model has proven inadequate... but is easily overcome by custom implementations based on triggers. You can hook the check-out event, and deny the check-out if your defined criteria are not met. (Ditto for check-in, and many other operations.) In this way, I have restricted access to various vob areas and file types based on individual user name, group membership, and other special-case criteria. I've disabled certain groups of users from moving labels; I've prevented anyone from moving certain labels backwards; etc. The possibilities are endless. Oh, yeah - it does require that you have a CC admin with a clue.
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