ClearCase (was: MacOS/Samba not playing nice)

[Michael ODonnell]

I haven't worked with ClearCase in quite a while but have done so
at several different companies.  Every source control system and
build/configuration manager has its problems and I certainly had
occasion to curse ClearCase from time to time, but in its (mild)
defense I'll mention some things I recall admiring about it:

 - I liked the way your (view of your) repository appeared as
   just a plain old filesystem hierarchy so you could operate on
   the files/ dirs therein with all the standard tools.  We even
   kept the tool chains in ClearCase so we'd be sure to have all
   the correct compilers and stuff for recreating ancient builds.

 - I liked (what we used to call) The Wayback Machine aspect
   where you could easily fall back to whatever versions were
   current at any particular time - useful for quickly finding
   when something got b0rken.

 - I liked the ClearCase-aware make that could determine if (as
   was often the case) a given target already existed in somebody
   else's view and, if so, perform a "wink-in" instead of having
   to build it locally.

On the other hand, anything but the most trivial deployment
(in which case, why bother with CC?) requires a dedicated,
savvy admin.  Distributed development was difficult.  And IIRC
the customer service from Rational wasn't great...