Re: Clear Case

[grante@visi.com (Grant Edwards)]

In muc.lists.debian.user, you wrote:
> %% grante@visi.com (Grant Edwards) writes:
> 
>   ge> CC is a very powerful system.  From what I remember (it's been 3-4
>   ge> years since I worked somewhere that used CC), administering it
>   ge> took up a considerable portion of one IT person's hours.  Maybe
>   ge> 1/4 to 1/2 of one person's time every week.
> 
> This depends on how many people you have, and various other
> factors such as how your systems are laid out, whether you are
> doing any Windows work (Windows clients are _much_ more work to
> support in ClearCase than UNIX clients), etc.

The setup where I worked was a Unix server and mostly NT
clients. ClearCase seemed to be a constant headache, but there
could have been some basic flaw in the way it was initially set
up. This was single server that supported about 10 small
project groups (2-10 people each).

I recently talked to some ex-coworkers and they've apparently
switched from a Unix servers to a Windows server, and things
got worse.  They thought that using Windows for both server and
client would eliminate some of the problems, but I guess it
didn't.

> We have 200+ developers, all UNIX, and we have one and a half
> people that do our ClearCase maintenance on our servers _plus_
> (a) all official product builds, (b) two or three "weekly
> builds", (c) various other process-level stuff (triggers,
> branch creation, etc.), (d) random other things :).  I also
> depends on what you count as "administration"; these people
> don't do any hardware or OS admin for the servers, nor do they
> do any network setup.

That sounds about right.  Where I used to work, I think we
would have been better off with something more lightweight, but
I was still happily using RCS at the time, so my perspective
was a bit different.

> Of course, we've been using ClearCase for over 7 years so we
> our admins have a very high level of expertise in the tool by
> now.

It sounds like it.

In any case, it's not something you just download, toss onto a
server, and tell people to use.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  This PIZZA symbolizes
                                  at               my COMPLETE EMOTIONAL
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