I'm a former cvs developer and the person responsible for seeing cvs used at Cygnus. I've been doing configuration management and release engineering for over a decade now. Cvs has been an embarassment to the free software world for at least that long. Yes, it's long overdue for replacement.
I agree on all your points. You make basically the same ones I do.
I'll add, remote work is important, especially to the free world, and clearcase offers little in this regard. However, clearcase offers two crucial features that have no analogue in free software.
1) I don't have to check out a tree. In seconds, I can have a clearcase "view" on all of the source at a company, regardless of size, for any version at any time, interactively. This is critical for answering telephone questions when I really can't afford to spend hours on "cvs co". Yes, a better GUI can prolly offer this sufficiently.
2) Build support. Because clearcase can store build manifests in the file system, clearcase can offer perfect, totally automated build dependency checking. It can also offer build avoidance which in some cases can take 24hr builds into the 60min range. Build avoidance can also address many disk space usage concerns, but personally, I've rarely found this to be an issue in practice.
However, here's one factor that I haven't seen addressed yet. In the range over about 64 concurrent users, and certainly once we've passed 128 users, down time for backups becomes unacceptable. Cvs has no formal backup strategy. Clearcase has several partially supported hacks that are in common use, (ie, backups via multisite, or temporarily-break-the-mirror schemes). Frankly, I don't know the right answer here. I wonder what the big database folks like oracle do as a matter of policy.
--rich
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I'm a former cvs developer and the person responsible for seeing cvs used at Cygnus. I've been doing configuration management and release engineering for over a decade now. Cvs has been an embarassment to the free software world for at least that long. Yes, it's long overdue for replacement. I agree on all your points. You make basically the same ones I do. I'll add, remote work is important, especially to the free world, and clearcase offers little in this regard. However, clearcase offers two crucial features that have no analogue in free software. 1) I don't have to check out a tree. In seconds, I can have a clearcase "view" on all of the source at a company, regardless of size, for any version at any time, interactively. This is critical for answering telephone questions when I really can't afford to spend hours on "cvs co". Yes, a better GUI can prolly offer this sufficiently. 2) Build support. Because clearcase can store build manifests in the file system, clearcase can offer perfect, totally automated build dependency checking. It can also offer build avoidance which in some cases can take 24hr builds into the 60min range. Build avoidance can also address many disk space usage concerns, but personally, I've rarely found this to be an issue in practice. However, here's one factor that I haven't seen addressed yet. In the range over about 64 concurrent users, and certainly once we've passed 128 users, down time for backups becomes unacceptable. Cvs has no formal backup strategy. Clearcase has several partially supported hacks that are in common use, (ie, backups via multisite, or temporarily-break-the-mirror schemes). Frankly, I don't know the right answer here. I wonder what the big database folks like oracle do as a matter of policy. --rich