Re: Comparison between CVS and ClearCase

[Donald Sharp]

Comment inline...

On Wed, Jan 03, 2001 at 10:35:32AM -0800, Paul Sander wrote:
> --- Forwarded mail from address@hidden
> 
> We are going to insert CM system to our company.
> 
> May be somebody can send me comparison between Rational ClearCase and CVS
> (with WinCvs).
> 
> --- End of forwarded message from address@hidden
> 
> I currently use CVS at home, and ClearCase at work; my position is
> configuration manager.  I work closely with ClearCase, and I'm pretty
> familiar with it.  I used to support several hundred users of CVS,
> and as of CVS v1.11 I'm still listed in the credits as a contributor
> to its sources.
> 
> I wrote this list several years ago, and updated it on Jan. 3, 2001.
> 
> Changing version control tools always exchanges one set of problems with
> another.  Although ClearCase is far superior to CVS in many ways, keep in
> mind the following:
> 
> - It costs several thousand dollars per user to license.
> - The number of supported platforms is fewer than CVS, however, they
>   include the most popular ones:  Solariss, HP-UX, AIX, Windows (NT and
>   2000), some versions of Linux.
> - It runs a large number of servers (some manage repositories, others
>   manage users' work spaces, and still others serve global resources).
>   They are quite resource intensive.
> - In prior releases, when shared workspaces are deleted, processes that
>   manipulate them didn't fail; they hung and couldn't be killed.  (Deleted
>   workspaces remained visible under certain circumstances, and must be
>   ignored.)  However, the handling of these situations has improved over the
>   years and they're no longer an issue.
> - ClearCase has one potentially serious scalability problem:  Only one
>   writer per database is permitted at a time.  This limits the practical
>   size of each repository and encourages layered build processes.

My understanding is that this has been fixed as of CC4.1.  Your now
able to have multiple writes at the same time...

donald