suggestions for CVS use

Kevin D. Clark kclark at CetaceanNetworks.com
Wed May 7 14:58:44 EDT 2003


pll at lanminds.com writes:

> >>>>> On Wed, 7 May 2003, "pll" == pll at lanminds.com wrote:
> 
>   pll> Not that I've heard of.  OSS development is inherently
>   pll> different from the type of development which ClearCase solves
>   pll> problems for.
> 
> 
> 
> >>>>> On 7 May 2003, "Kevin" == Kevin D. Clark wrote:
> 
>   Kevin> How's that?
> 
> Disclaimer:  I'm not saying that CVS can not be used in enterprise 
>              development environments successfully, or in place of 
>              ClearCase.
> 
> 
> ClearCase use assumes that centralized development with 
> high-speed access to the VOBS and Views, and this is a requirement if 
> you're using dynamic Views.

Well, at the very least, your statement about dynamic views is *very*
true.  I know this from experience.

> CVS assumes sporatic connections and extremely decentralized development,
> and only requires network connectivity when accessing the repository.

However, the repository is centralized.

>   pll> ClearCase also requires NFS/SMB connected access, which is a
>   pll> major pain IMO.
> 
>   Kevin> Is this true if you exclusively use snapshot views?
> 
> If you're using snapshot views exclusively, then no.  However, if 
> you're development environment is structured such that everyone uses 
> snapshot views, I'd argue that CVS would have been a much more 
> worthwhile investment of your money, since you aren't able to take 
> advantage of a lot of CC functionality.

The only things that come to mind that you'd be missing are
clearmake's dependency checking (which is imperfect, BTW) and not
having to update views with "clearmake update" a lot.  OTOH, I've
found myself using "-time now" in my config specs a lot, so this leads
me to wonder "why was I using a dynamic view, anyways...?".

> Personally, I'm a little leary of snapshot views.  Granted, I have no 
> experience with them, since the last time I actively used CC, they 
> didn't exist.  However, they came to exist as a work-around to enable 
> CC to work in a windows environment where SMB connections would 
> sproratically reset or hang and cause data corruption.
> 
> Also, my understanding is that snapshot views are available only 
> under Windows.  Is this incorrect?

Yes, this is incorrect.  I've used snapshot and dynamic views on
Windows, Solaris, and Linux.


No doubt about it though: ClearCase is a very resource intensive,
expensive, sometimes unwieldy, powerful, and handy kind of tool.


Regards,

--kevin
-- 
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