Graduating from ClearCase/ClearQuest

Once seen as the top source control tool by many, including myself, I have come to the conclusion that ClearCase is now dead. Yes developers, you can rejoice now - I said it... ClearCase is Dead. And I... Well, I am a former ClearCase zealot.

But why? What killed it? Speed, Support, and Windows/Eclipse.

Speed has to be factor #1. There is a reason why people wrote Subversion frontends to interact with ClearCase views... It took too many steps to get at their code. Making files read-only until checked out was a great idea 20 years ago -- but it is only a hindrance now (see Eclipse references later). ClearCase is also network transport intensive. Since the location of all the code was server-side only, in order to work with branches meant to create views and populate a snapshot -- or in our case you were forced to use a dynamic view or CCRC.

Support. Why does it have to be such a dirty word? Perhaps I should clarify... Why is knowledge so scarce? How is it that a consumer of a product could know more about the product than the vendor? Alright, I concede that I am certainly not the average ClearCase user -- and I have painfully learned that I am also not the average ClearCase administrator. But still, if I call your company, please be able to connect the dots -- and know what your software does. Don't make me do it for you.

And finally we come to the wonder that is Eclipse on Windows. I used to hate eclipse. It was the root of all evil. It is bloated and slow, and in my mind was replaceable with vi. Since then, I have learned that my issue isn't really with eclipse... it is with the population of developers that refuse to work in any environment other than eclipse in windows.

But why? It turned out to be the pain of supporting people using eclipse in ClearCase. Sure, the support for snapshot views are pretty good in eclipse -- and recently CCRC has received some great attention... but I am still marred by the support of users using dynamic views with eclipse.

The biggest problem? Files are read-only until checked out. CCRC addressed this with allowing the conversion of hijacked files to checkins. Without that, it was plain unusable. Those developers I referred to before who will only work on eclipse and in windows -- those are the same people who refuse to perform version control. They can keep their work in eclipse for a couple of months without trying to integrate it. This leads to pain, suffering, and merging hell.

So where can we go from here?