Question

I have a bad fortune of using ClearCase with UCM at work. We try to find a way to get user experience smoother while using it. One of the main problems is that all files are read-only until checked out. This interferes with using IDEs and their refactoring capabilities. Unreserved checkout changes little as it still requires perform check out explicitly. Can Edit-Merge approach be somehow emulated? For example, can ClearCase somehow make unreserved checkout on file modification automatically and not impose read only mode on them?

Answer 1

The way we approach the interaction between:

• refactoring operations
• ClearCase

is to use an IDE with a good ClearCase plugin:
The only way to preserve the history for files is doing the refactoring through an IDE like Eclipse without checkouting the files first: The ClearCase plugin will ‘cleartool move‘ the files from their old name to their new names and checkout/checkin them, preserving their history.

The other manual way is less ideal:
You isolate that operation in a snapshot view in which, just for this refactoring, we clear up the read-only bit from all the files (so they are all in “hijacked” state).
Once the refactoring is done, we use the result as a source to import in a dynamic view.
clearfimport -mirror.
You can use a dynamic view as the destination, but the end result is new files with no link to their former filename.

The main idea being: you don’t refactor your code every 5 minutes or even every day, so , with the right tool, you could have an acceptable way of mitigating the file-centric nature of ClearCase.