Comments on: ClearCase (Proprietary) versus CVS (Open Source)

By: chovy

chovy — Thu, 29 May 2008 05:57:38 +0000

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.

By: COIRAM

COIRAM — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:16:11 +0000

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?

By: Andrew Marlow

Andrew Marlow — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:06:47 +0000

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”.

By: jcabad

jcabad — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 09:50:40 +0000

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!

By: chandrakanth

chandrakanth — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 03:40:48 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Having used both, I have to say that ClearCase is superior. Sounds like folks are mismanaging it.

By: chovy

chovy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

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

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Rad

Rad — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

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.