Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Rational ClearCase

Murray Cumming writes: Lots of mistakes have been made during this project, but nothing else has hurt us so much as ClearCase. Every other problem could have been overcome if it hadn't been for ClearCase at the bottom of our dependency tree. This could not be more obvious.

I comprehend Murray's pain about ClearCase. Still I'd say ClearCase itself is not the root of all evil, but its misapplication is - and clearly ClearCase does not prevent its own misapplication (even worse, it encourages it). I have wandered the swamp of evil, when people completely abused ClearCase features at one place - version trees (or should I say forrests?) of byzantine complexity, dozens of branches (the kind that can never be merged back), differing config.spec's on each client, that kind of stuff. Somewhere else, I saw ClearCase work just beautifully (aligned with clear developer guidelines, using snapshot views only).