Question

We currently have a fat SourceSafe DB with ten years of code in it. We’re looking for an easy and stable way to import all of this in to a new Clearcase/Jazz environment.

What is the best best method of doing this and are there any tools out there to do this automagically?

Answer 1

I know this doesn’t answer your question directly, but we had a similar problem several years ago when we moved from VSS to Perforce. We looked at the ways in which we could migrate the histories for all the files, but any solution we found had problems and would have taken a long time to execute.

In the end we simply decided to import the current version of the code into Perforce as the baseline and leave the old history in VSS. In the early days we did refer back to VSS occasionally, but after a few months we didn’t need to.

If there’s a problem with a file you only need the last couple of revisions to be able to see what’s changed and why. So if the file changes fairly frequently you’ll soon build up a useful history in the new repository. If the file doesn’t change then by definition it’s stable an you don’t need the history.

If you back up the old repository you can always go back to it if you really need to to dig out the hold history.