R – Identify the correct tool for developers, based on real needs

clearcaseclearcase-remote-clientversion control

I will start with a little background for perspective to the question, what legitimate questions can I pose in order to identify the correct source control tool for the real needs of my development teams?

The developers have used ClearCase since an IBM consulting lead project team installed it for use during a large in-house project. During this project the Rational Suite was used to perform tasks, testing, etc. Once this project was completed, only ClearCase was used as a method of storing source code. Unfortunately, at this time ClearCase is used by the developers as a mandatory tool. Until a global project was started at the beginning of 2009, other colleagues abroad used primarily SVN. The global project now requires these developers to use ClearCase Remote Client (CCRC).

I have observed the tool, though very powerful, appears too much for their development needs. The UCM process is implemented on-site, but there is much expressed frustration with the process steps and particularly when using CCRC. The other issue is other development tools require files to be writeable in order to complete development tasks, causing developers to hijack in order to work.

As many companies are now outsourcing and reevaluating all their strategies in order to remain competitive and financially viable, I would like to verify we have the right tool for the right reasons and one that will support not only development activities and needs today, but also for the future. I look forward to gaining a better understanding of this issue.

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what legitimate questions can I pose in order to identify the correct source control tool for the real needs of my development teams?

IMO, some of these questions include:

What is the status quo?
Why is the status quo? [Perhaps political: an IBM consulting lead project]
Why might we want to change (what are the incentives)?
What are the alternatives that we could change to?
What would we gain, and what would be lose, by changing to an alternative?
What would be the cost (or effort) associated with changing it?

How do you create a new project/repository?

A git repository is simply a directory containing a special .git directory.

This is different from "centralised" version-control systems (like subversion), where a "repository" is hosted on a remote server, which you checkout into a "working copy" directory. With git, your working copy is the repository.

Simply run git init in the directory which contains the files you wish to track.

For example,

cd ~/code/project001/
git init

This creates a .git (hidden) folder in the current directory.

To make a new project, run git init with an additional argument (the name of the directory to be created):

git init project002

(This is equivalent to: mkdir project002 && cd project002 && git init)

To check if the current current path is within a git repository, simply run git status - if it's not a repository, it will report "fatal: Not a git repository"

You could also list the .git directory, and check it contains files/directories similar to the following:

$ ls .git
HEAD         config       hooks/       objects/
branches/    description  info/        refs/

If for whatever reason you wish to "de-git" a repository (you wish to stop using git to track that project). Simply remove the .git directory at the base level of the repository.

cd ~/code/project001/
rm -rf .git/

Caution: This will destroy all revision history, all your tags, everything git has done. It will not touch the "current" files (the files you can currently see), but previous changes, deleted files and so on will be unrecoverable!

R – Migrating Clearcase to X

I can't speak for the migration tool, but mercurial has worked great for us. We have a mix of WinXP, Mac OS X, and Linux people and there haven't been any snags. I don't use an IDE, but I believe Aptana acquired the pydev group (Python for Eclipse) so I wouldn't be too surprised if they have that.

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Related Solutions

Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide

How do you create a new project/repository?

R – Migrating Clearcase to X

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