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It's an antiquated Configuration management tool from a long time ago. It doesn't play with any development tools and is confusing to use. At least once it has corrupted my files.
Some of us have been trying to get our company into the '90s and get a better CM tool but the PHBs are used to hearing about Razor so we don't change.
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I used ClearCase for years, both as a user and as an administrator. It has got to be the most convoluted, God-awful RCS on the planet.
Its biggest drawback is that everything occurs over the network. You create a virtual drive that points to the versioned object (VOB). Files that are checked out (locking system = bad) are local to your machine. Everything else is coming from the server. Builds are slow as hell.
Multi-site support requires someone to be a "merge master" and put the right bits in the right places every morning when the remote packet is merged. Been there, done that, not going near it again.
Subversion is a much better product. Smaller, easier to administer, and need only rely on HTTPS instead of custom protocols. Since every engineer is responsible for merging his own changes, no one has to be a merge master at 0700 before people hack on the code for the day.
ClearCase. *BLECH* 
Paul
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I have to use clearcase
Besides the issues you mention "hiccups" in the integration to VS have cost me several hours and none of the interface is intuitive. Lacking in common features like "check in but keep checked out".
I've used most of the other products mentioned in other jobs, Subversion being my favorite. Any are better than ClearCase. Someone spent the $$ .. now I am stuck with it.
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I worked at Rational for years before and just after they were bought out by IBM.
The situation is even worse than both you suggest, though you hit many of the problems.
ClearCase also maintains client enlistment state information on both the Server AND the Client.
*AND* both sets of data have to both exist and agree, or the clients' enlistment becomes unusable without admininstrator intervention.
It was not uncommon for the client-side file turds that store the Client-side Client state information to become corrupted (HDD dropout or failure, BSOD, etc), and thereafter have the client be unusable until things were patched up.
After a while I personally got in the habit of routinely using a CMD + Perl script to detect files that were changed in my enlistment(s) and squirrel them away somewhere.
That way, when ClearCase quit working on my machine because one of the file turds got wacked or wacky and if the administrators' were not available or unresponsive, I could at least recover my state by creating a new enlistment and starting over.
Well, even that was not always possible, not before the original client was recovered or deleted.
But at least I *could* recover.
However, doesn't all that sort of negate the reason for having SCC in the first place? If users have to squirrel away private copies of their code to protect it from the SCC system itself AND often work outside of or around the SCC system in order to get their work done, what's the point???
FWIW and as an employee of Rational we used to routinely file bug reports and usability dings etc against ClearCase, but all that did is incur the wrath of management who believed the boneheads who owned ClearCase when they said we were just whiners and weren't qualified to pass judgement on an enterprise-capable SCC system.
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So ClearCase was orginally good, (as if) and IBM wrecked it?
"Listen, and listen well. I really like the band N-Sync. My favorite member is Harpo. I think there's a Harpo. If not there should be. I will write their next hit, maybe 'A boom-boom chiky chiky boom-boom a boom-boom chiky chaka chaka cho cho.' By the way, you must beware of Betty's iron claw. They are sharp, and they hurt. And beware his song about big butts, he beats people up while he plays it! " - Master Tang (from Kung Pow: Enter the Fist)
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The Dogcow Farmer wrote: So ClearCase was orginally good, (as if) and IBM wrecked it?
No, ClearCase was originally terrible, and IBM managed to make it worse...;P
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Took the words right outta my mouth.
IBM really had nothing to do with it, ClearCase was an abomination well before IBM inherited it via their acquisition of Rational.
It's my understanding (unverified) that in the distant past the codebase that became ClearCase was inherited from some SCC system or another that was Unix-based and was alledged to be much better in it's original state on Unix as a Unix app. But I can't say that with any certainty, that's just what I heard...
In any case, that's my experience with CC. FWIW I've known some SCC admin types who love CC because once they know the ins and outs it allows them all sorts of flexibility, control (down to the level of Draconian paranoid lockdown of client activity) and so on...
My experience was strictly as a user and was overwhelmingly negative...
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We had ClearCase (CC) for about a year and it was very ugly to work with it.
It didn't work intuitive at all, thinking of the 'config specs' gives me the creeps.
On the first sight one can see that CC is a very old dinosaur, with it's old MOTIF-GUI, set on top of a command-line tool. Patchwork. When I first tried to set up an UCM process, ClearCase answered with some errors - the GUI couldn't find some commands - not inspiring confidence.
There seemed to be a few developers of CC which saw how NOT to build an SCM Tool.
They seem to have learned a lot and started to make a new tool years ago:
AccuRev.
My collegue had worked with AccuRev in his former company, so it attracted our attention when he talked about it.
After a period of evaluation, we switched to AccuRev in our company, beginning of 2008, and we are very happy with it.
E.g. concept, performance, handling, support are all excellent... the contrary of CC.
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When I started to work for my current employer, subversion was a great discovery for me.
I've heard of it before, but team or project leaders in last company were against it!
I'm not sure if they were just lazy or intimidated with new...
They (me included) used SourceSafe and for several months simple backups and merging with WinMerge.
For now, I have only good words for subversion, it's not perfect (there is trouble if you are asking for it  , for instance sharing stuff that relies on generated code like dataSets), but it's far better than SourceSafe.
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Oshtri Deka wrote: When I started to work for my current employer, subversion was a great discovery for me.
Same here. Discovered it at current employer. Prior to that it's mostly been SourceSafe.
Kevin
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What about Mercurial? - http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/
or GIT?
Both are used by some of the biggest Open source projects including the Linux Kernel
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I have used this on the linux side using the text commands mainly to pull stuff down from .git servers. Are you using this under windows? Is there a gui client? Most of my users probably would not like the complexity that the text clients have to offer.
John
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I tried TortoiseHg just today.
It's quite more mature than I expected it. And even if you don't use the shell extension, it's probably the fastest and easiest way to get a working command-line Mercurial environment under Windows. (well, command line plus useful tools like qct; which is the way I use it on Linux)
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I used Subversion for a year or two. Then I tried git... and it seemed confusing. Mercurial is the one that made me understand (and love) the DVCS concepts. The support for branching and merging is a bit like moving from CVS to SVN and noticing the repository-wide revision number: once you switch, you can't look back.
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Being rolled out here, not being utilised for a couple of months yet for some reason. In the options I had to select "None", before I could submit an "Other" entry though...
He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man
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Don't forget it. I wouldn't consider it until there's more client tools available, but it's starting to look a bit appealing.
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GIT and CVS should be in the options.
In fact, I used 2, namely CVS and SVN. CVS is for the old legacy projects which we do not wish to move to SVN.
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Most people use more than one source control system. Well I use 3
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My department (about 10 developers) has active code in:
Visual Source Safe
PVCS
CVS
ClearCase
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I second this as well - TFS at work, Perforce at home
-----
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
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Well for my projects I use CVS and SVN. To get code updates (mostly on the linux side) I have used hg, cvs, svn, git and bzr.
John
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No option for CVS? 
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Rob Caldecott wrote: No option for CVS?
Thank God! 
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