Question

While at home for personal projects i use Mercurial, at work we’re using ClearCase.

I am attempting to run a few horizontal (touching lots of source files) refactorings in Visual Studio for the code base, however, for since each file is locked by ClearCase, it has to be unlocked and prompts for the actual activity that the check out is for.

In Mercurial, there’s no such concept as far as i’m aware of: files are not being locked at all at any point of time!

Is there a way of doing such a refactoring, or any other operation that acts on multiple files, without having to check out each and every one manually?

Answer 1

In a DVCS (distributed VCS like Git or Mercurial), you simply cannot “lock” a file, since all the other repos wouldn’t be aware of such a “status”.

But with ClearCase and its locking mechanism (optimist with “unreserved checkout” or pessimist with “reserved checkout”), you need to make a checkout to tell ClearCase you will modify some files.

However, you could also, for large refactoring:

• make and update a snapshot view
• set all the files as writable (through an OS-based command, not through ClearCase “checkout”)
• perform your changes
• search for all hijacked files and checkout/checkin those files then