Since this is my own personal blog, of which I can post whatever I want, I figured I’d vent a bit on using ClearCase vs. CVS.
For those of you who don’t know, CVS and ClearCase are both “source control” applications. CVS being the opensource version. ClearCase the proprietary software.
My company recently switched to ClearCase (for the “superior” merge handling). Although from what I can tell, productivity has gone down hill, merges are causing erroneous code, and the mess of branches for each project is a nightmare to keep track of. Not to mention constantly changing the way in which we use ClearCase (ie – dynamic view vs. snapshot view).
Anyway, that’s where I stand, I’m an open source advocate, have been working with open source technologies for the past 7 years, and I’ve come to conclusion the open source version is usually better than any proprietary solution. There is also a branch of CVS called SubVersion, which is even more usable than CVS or ClearCase.
Anonymous
October 22, 2004 at 11:06 pm
Having used both, I have to say that ClearCase is superior. Sounds like folks are mismanaging it.
chovy
October 23, 2004 at 1:19 am
Yes, admittedly, after talking to several co-workers who have used CC before, they agree that we are not using it properly. We are all on seperate snapshot views, which means rebase/delivery for every change, which requires a build inbetween – taking anywhere from 1-2 hours.
Anonymous
January 13, 2005 at 5:08 am
I’ve been using both clearcase and cvs (and some other as well) and I rank clearcase as number one. BUT… clearcase requires strict administration by a competent administrator to ensure config specs are set correctly and consistently through out the project. I don’t recommend using snapshot views either.
/Lennart
Anonymous
February 15, 2005 at 6:38 pm
I’ve used them both (CC, CVS). My vote goes for CVS, any day. Yes, maybe Chovy’s group isn’t using CC properly, but guess what — most folks don’t use CVS properly either.
I’ve seen some groups that don’t know that you place symlink creation in the Makefile so they get created during “make co”.
A good CVS system requires a scripter (as in Perl or Python) to do things like rename directories, but before you say “aha!” let me say that CC always needs an expert to figure out nasty issues like multi-site.
I think the only situation I can see that CC wins is when one is compiling large program units (ie a single source file and transitive closure of include files) and the winkin’ between users actually saves time.
Anyhoo, Subversion blows them both away, and it is free.
Rad
March 17, 2005 at 11:32 pm
Having used both CC and CVS, I found CVS much easier to learn and use. Clearcase needs a trained admnistrator to configure and maintain. I was able to use and train my team about CVS and manage the administration of it as a side task along with development and managing a team.
The clearcase docymentaion is full of jargon liek ‘vobs’, views, snapshots, etc. most of which are specific to clearcase and not intuitive to someone who has used other source code control mechanismsm like SCCS, RCS and CVS.
The CC documentaion is hard to read as it deals with non-generic terms liek vob, view, snapshot, etc. specific to CC, not ecountered with others like SCCS, RCS, CVS.
Anonymous
March 31, 2005 at 9:21 pm
I’ve used both. Cleacase is much better. The concept of VOB,view and config spec is not difficult at all if you are open minded to learn,config spec of view is very helpful. Open source SCM suite has a long way to go.
Anonymous
June 1, 2005 at 10:45 am
Having used both, and administered both, clearcase is very nice, but CVS is okay too.
I’ve noticed that source control is like editors and OSes, the one you are used to using is the best and everything else is junk. I currently work with a lot of people used to using Clearcase and are now temporarily stuck with CVS, and they hate it. Very few people are open to trying new things.
Clearcase UCM is very nice and alleviates most of the overhead issues of clearcase. It does reduce some of the flexibility but it handles things like merging and personal branches very nicely.
CVS can be just as complicated as Clearcase, it depends on how it’s used, project plans, how well a project is managed, and how mature your product is and how many versions of your product you are supporting. Source control systems get blamed for a lot that is totally out of it’s hands. If a project isn’t being managed correctly, SCM isn’t going to fix it.
Entropy
June 14, 2005 at 8:41 am
Definitely, clearcase is the No.1 version control tool in the world, not only for it reliability but for the concept it developed. It is a great example of OO developing.
One thing people always feel confused about Clearcase is the commands, so that more and more move to GUI interface, esp. for windows user. BUT if one can not grasp the commands of clearcase, he/she can not say he/she know clearcase.
I like its UNIX-like idea, distributed compliling support and multi-site capability. I hate snapshot view too.
It does need a lot of administrating, give one example:
A companmy using Clearcase managing less than 100,000 code and no multisite, and people complian that it is slow, while another company using it manages huge number of code(each day over 200MB code is synchronized), no one complain. Please note that the latter does not have much powerful or much more hardware.
Anyway I love Open Source, so I am eager to find one which has similar functionalities of Clearcase.
chovy
June 14, 2005 at 11:05 am
I don’t like all the arcane terminology.
Vobs, streams, views, dynamic, snapshot, integration.
And no Dummy’s Book. :(
Anonymous
June 22, 2005 at 12:50 pm
Thank you Anthony, because that is exactly how I feel. For the most part, ClearCase is a more scalable and powerful tool, but it is NOT easier to use, and your everyday developer just needs to check-in/out, look at history, rollback, label and branch. To do this in ClearCase, it requires an entire project by itself. Also, to use a Rational term, the “Happy Day Scenario” is better supported and easier to accomplish using CVS.
Face it, Rational makes the tool TOO functional to please everyone and they place hooks in it trying to force you to buy the other products in their suite. I’m interested in seeing what IBM does with it now that they own Rational…
Anonymous
July 13, 2005 at 11:44 am
Heya,
as lots of people here (as it seems), I used both, too. And: Comparing ClearCase to CVS isn’t exactly fair — for CVS.
ClearCase is really great in handling branches — this is the number one weakness of CVS. ClearCase has support for storing and merging binary (non-text) data, which is a constant annoyance to anybody who want to track more than notepad data in version control. ClearCase has lots of possibilities to identify file sets (by version, by labels, by attributes), which might come handy. CC is the more modern, much more powerful system, in many respects. And you can customize ClearCase as you like it, probably beyond any reasonable limit. :-)
On the other hand, CVS is easy to setup, and easy to run. The build-in support for keyword expansion is especially helpful for developers. Twice as true as you do not need to setup triggers, as you would need to implement the same functionality in ClearCase. Working with local copies (ClearCase: the widely discouraged snapshot views) really saves time; generally, CVS (at least appears to be) faster than ClearCase. But it’s faster because it’s much simpler, in may ways: The network support still is — puny. Mind you, CVS started as a set of RCS scripts.
However, both systems do target completely different scenarios; they do not really compete: ClearCase needs active, full time skilled administrators, people writing and enforcing guidelines, but it allows massive parallel development. CVS can’t really do that (it’s a pain to maintain this stuff in CVS, even after you read the books), but it doesn’t need administrators, and anybody should be able to set it up in 30 minutes (including reading a quickstart guide). Finally, CVS is quite cheap (just 30 min manpower, and the occasional backup).
So, what’s crappy? What’s superior? Obviously, it depends on your need. I would not dare to run my current project site (lots of different software suppliers, moving timelines, short-term package changes; usually two merges a day, up to ten for the big deployment) with CVS — it would be suicide. On the other hand, I would not dream to put my companies repositories (few developers, practically no parallel development — for some years completely happy with CVS) into something like ClearCase: It would not only be a waste of money, but of time and resources.
I do support OSS for a very long time. I really like the whole thing, and I always point out that the cost of a software does not neccesarily implies anything about its quality. But this works both ways: Simply being OSS does not mean “superior”. Is means “OSS”: You can get the source, you can modify it legally, if you need, and you don’t have to sign an NDA.
Further, Subversion, as you mentioned it, is *not* another flavor of CVS. It was independently designed and developed, on a completely different technological background and without any CVS legacy (but some command line compatibility), and is, in it’s very nature, quite “hostile” against CVS (see http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#why). In the eyes of SVN, CVS is “crappy” and should cease to exist; they would probably rather side with ClearCase than with CVS.
:-)
Have a nice day,
/Till/
chandrakanth
August 16, 2006 at 8:40 pm
As per my knowledge clearcase is No.1, I worked on clearcase and CVS, but in clearcase concept is very good but required well experinced engg to setup and adminstration.
CVS is a open source but not for large organization.
jcabad
June 26, 2007 at 2:50 am
I’ve worked with both CVS and ClearCase. I used CVS together with TortoiseCVS “client” which integrates seamlessly and transparently in the Window browser. I manage to get and R&D department of 35 people including the secretary, the mechanical engineers and even my boss :) to used it! Only 7 of them were software developers. CVS saved the department; previously nobody new where in the network were the last version of the schedules, budgets,etc. Integrating data of probably about 15 concurrent projects was achieved just using a collaborative environment supported by CVS (e.g. for budgetting all project managers filled up their Excel worksheet derived from MSP data and a master one summed up all, etc.);previously my boss had everybody in the office till 2-3am integrating all data every quarter! The hell! We worked with CVS during 3 years and of course we experienced some problems; sometimes files remained locked to somebody that teorethically had not checked it in, when somebody went in holiday and forgot a file checked out there was no way to make a undo checkout as administrator, etc.The first issue mentioned was the worst and most ugly;sometimes we manage to trick CVS by clering completely the folder local copy but sometimes it was impossible to fix it;we lost some time but we never lost information;we were then forced to create files with new names and change corresponding dependencies;i should also mention that one supervisor (chemical engineer) deleted a huge CVS-project folder with direct command from CVS-Tortoise;the data recovery was not easy.Such situation are not acceptable for “mission-critical” project like typically software development and i would really would not recommend it for software development. I also work with ClearCase and i have also faced problems and i do have lost information in the last days; working with Dynamic Views it happens two times that while editing a (previously checked-in/out)Word file, it seems to be that if there is a glitch in the network Word lost connection to the file in the Dynamic view and it is not able to recover; what is worst is that in the Dynamic view you do not find the last version saved nor the *.tmp file! All work is gone!…I have never developed software on my own with ClearCase (i used to use VSS) but if something like that happens with my valuable source code i would be mad! I had also other problem with ClearCase and Microsoft documents that our dedicated administrator was not able to solve; he did not know where to beggin: I was able to add PowerPoint and Word documents to source control and then check them out but then when you were trying to save the first modification PowerPoint or Word told me that the file was write protected,which was not. The only chance to work on it was to copy the file (from the Dynamic view) to my local harddisk, editing it and then overwritting the one in the dyn. view…ugly and error prone!….Additionally, what i acomplish in the first history, would have been impossible with ClearCase, firstly because it is so expensive, secondly because its use is not intuitive (well, a lot of CVS are not intuitive either, TortoiseCVS is)…..you got the facts, you decide!
Andrew Marlow
February 14, 2008 at 3:06 am
I feel your pain. I think Clearcase is terrible. The one and only thing it has going for it is the way it looks at merging. I have to admit, that is good. But it is not worth the pain just because of that.
A couple of years ago I attended the ACCU conference in Oxford where Peter Goodlife had a session on source code control tools. At the start he asked the audience to see who was working in a clearcase environment. I put my hand up. His response was simply “I feel sorry for you”.
COIRAM
May 10, 2008 at 5:16 am
I am a ClearCase administrator since 2002.
There is a fine line in these topics about wich is better: ClearCase or CVS or maybe SVN?
Few of you have underlined that CVS is for small organisation, other that ClearCase is somewhat difficult to administrate. CVS is free and ClearCase complicated and requires licenses. All true!
So you need to ask yourself the following questions, is what I do during my work:
- What is your purpose?
- Do you need to achieve any standard?
- How big is the organisation?
- Do you intend to use parallel developent?
- Do you intend to reuse the source code?
- How many projects do you foresee?
CVS replies positevely to some of the above questions. SVN positevely to few more. ClearCase to all of them. I dare some one to say otherwise ;-)
It is also true that there are lots of “cow-boys” in the Software Configuration arena that are just there for the money (I am sorry to be blunt and direct).
I am sorry to see that several organisation, small or big, to wast time, patience and money by investing in a poorly constructed SCM. You should let do the job to the professional
Question: if you break your arm, shall you go to the shaman or the Emergency Room?
chovy
May 28, 2008 at 10:57 pm
I don’t much like CVS (although at the time it was glorious compared to my clearcase experience).
I’ve been using SVN indepth now for a few years, just now starting to do more vendor branches and merges…so we’ll see how that all goes.
ADY
August 7, 2009 at 5:17 am
ClearCase is a very good and robust tool with many advantages over CVS, but is only useful for organizations with a CC full-time expert on the roster.
The ClearDiffMerge tool (the Windows ClearCase merger tool), is a shameful example of a merge tool. This is one of the main pitfalls of CC. Its graphical GUI has several major usability issues, which frankly I don’t know how those could have been made.
For example, how is it possible that different sized fonts are used in combination in the code view panes? this makes it impossible to monitor indentation changes. Also, I suspect that this tool does not differentiate between regular white-space and CR/LFs (which should not be treated as regular white-space for a reliable merge).
However, there are also some good points with this GUI, once you’ve mastered it. And by mastered, i mean mastered (it’s not simple).
In my company, most developers have changed this unreliable default merge tool to other tools like WinMerge and BeyondCompare.
My only guess is that the merge tool GUI design team in IBM/Rational are not coders.
Chippy
December 15, 2009 at 9:33 am
So during the five years this blog has existed we’ve deployed ClearCase UCM. It was a learning experience…we moved from a ‘tailored’ RCS environment. CVS was piloted. It did not bring much over RCS. We had used ClearCase UCM for Software application development for many years. In this incarnation it was to be applied to ASIC/FPGA source control. We drew upon the skills of the SCM administration team and the EDA Engineering support team to implement the solution. It has been deployed for about three years with incremental changes to the use model to support some advanced parallel development needs.
Parallel development is one benefit – especially between the Implementation and Verification teams. Multisite support is another plus, though not heavily used at the moment.
Re-use is a promise – lightly used now. This is not a revision control problem, per se. To fully realize this benefit will take some adherence to process that only comes with strong management commitment and good project leadership from the early architecture and partitioning of work. We tend to fall short, dismissing the up-front effort and taking the easy route (copy/rename) – a “casual re-use” approach that yields little benefit across multiple projects.
ClearCase adoption is disruptive because it requires a different use model. Change is a tough sell – especially when there is legacy involved. Nobody embraces change willingly. It reminds me of the paradigm shift MCAD Engineers were faced with when 3D Mechanical CAD came to the forefront. Did we overcome the learning curve that designing in the third dimension required? Yes. Would we ever go back to designing in two dimensions? I think not. ClearCase is no different in this respect. Once the curve is behind you, you move on. It requires no more effort of the designer than any other control system. The power it brings to concurrent, team based design is unsurpassed.
chovy
December 19, 2009 at 1:13 am
One can make an entire career on knowing the ins and outs of clearcase alone…I probably wouldn’t say that for subversion or git (unless you’re developing it).
migu
February 4, 2010 at 3:19 am
At the end of the day, having CC in an organisation will require a large overhead for the relatively simple task of managing your source code. This may or may not be required depending on the complexity of release and support handling within the organisation. Hence, there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution in either of the proposed solutions. Arguing wether one or the other is the greatest one is simply a matter of perspective and need.
Imho, CC is the way to go for a large, distributed project organisation with a complex structure and release/maintenance scedule. And of course A -very- competent cc-admin.
For all others: pick any SCM-software except VSS, which should be avoided for many reasons.
Oh and I have thorough knowledge of CC, CVS and many other SCM-software with many years in the business as a software architect and a CM-expert.
sw dev
March 3, 2010 at 9:17 am
Clearcase is superior to CVS
Clearcase is like a stable high end easy to drive luxury car.
CVS just isn’t.
The project I work with has used CC for the the last 10 years and the so-called full time admin takes about two minutes every few months to prepare the next release environment including config specs, views, branches, et all. And he spends less than a day a year in managing the application, storage, etc.
I’ve done thousands of automatic/manual merges, file additions/removal, and most other aspects of using CC all without error.
chovy
March 5, 2010 at 9:37 am
I’ve used ClearCase, TeamSite, CVS, RCS, Subversion and Git — I like subversion, but Git makes branch management a whole lot easier. TeamSite is cool too.
cvs frustration
March 25, 2010 at 12:52 pm
In Clearcase we can build the official application from within the CM environment. The build person cannot alter any files without the CM tool tracking it. That means there is no opportunity to alter the source code in a local area before building. All files are protected by the CM tool. This is correct and proper CM protocol.
However
In Cvs we build the official application from within a snapshot view that is local to a user. That user can alter the source code without CVS being aware. And for that matter noone else is aware either. They can change anything they want and add/subtract it from the official build. This puts the project at the mercy and temperment of the build person to not alter the source code. These bugs are very difficult, if not impossible, to find mainly because they don’t exist in the code repository maintained by cvs. This condition is an extreme violation of good CM protocol.
cvs review
July 14, 2010 at 8:58 am
I’ve just finished an industry evaluation of companies that use cvs.
Here are the three most frequent reasons they selected cvs over other tools in that segment.
1) The company is stagnant, failing or new.
In all three cases the company was exchanging better tools for those with less functionality or reported cost.
New/stagnant companies didn’t have the budget to acquire licensed software they actually desired to use and collapsing companies were more concerned with reducing the costs exposed on external financial reports
2) Poor software management.
Many companies using cvs had either no formal software development cycle or it was unclear.
These companies displayed higher incidences to one-off, ad-hoc, and false emergency type activities.
They seemed to use cvs just because they were supposed to use something and in addition cvs has no upfront licensing cost. All other costs associated with cvs were not accounted for, like waiting on snapshot views to load, manually reviewing update logs/merges, maintaining interface software, etc.
3) Software set is simple.
There tended to be more products that had a limited feature set or the product was just not expanding. There were not new applications, new developers coming into the product mix and old ones being transitioned out.
Many of the products could have just as easily been maintained using a personal directory structure and often were previously to someone saying they needed to get a versioning tool.
There are companies that use cvs for other reasons but again these were just the 3 primary reasons I found during this evaluation for companies using cvs.