Question

Who can lock/unlock/obsolete streams (or any other object) in a clearcase project? Do you have to be a privilaged user to perform these operations on streams that you didn’t create?

Answer 1

The cleartool lock man page does mention:

• unix: type/object owner, VOB owner, root
• Windows: type/object owner, VOB owner, member of the ClearCase administrators group (which is the “privilege user”: see “About ClearCase privileged users on Windows“)

ClearCase privileged user is a designation referring to a user account that is a member of the clearcase group, which is granted ClearCase administrator rights when working in Full ClearCase.
Members of the clearcase group are granted special ClearCase rights.

Regarding Stream, a lock -obsolete Stream:xxx might be your only way to “remove” a Stream (especially if baselines were already created on it): see “Removing a UCM stream that has a delivered baseline“.

Here are some examples for locking multiple instances of a same type of object.

To be sure a lock has actually worked, use the -fmt "%n %[locked]p\n" format when listing Streams:

cleartool lsstream -obsolete -fmt "%n %[locked]p\n" -invob vob

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The OP Raihan adds in the comments:

According to the ClearCase documentation it it recommended to lock a stream before creating a baseline to prevent users from delivering during the process.
Isn’t it overkill for a ‘Project Manager’ or ‘Integrator’ to have the root privilege who is managing a single UCM project (not necessarily created by him)?

Two things:

• one, that means locking a stream with the -nuser option, in order to allow the integrator to perform operations (like making a baseline) on that stream.
• two, if the integrator is not the owner an in… “integration” stream, then he/she asks the ClearCase administrator to give him/her the ownership of said Stream.

cleartool protect -chown integratorLogin stream:aStream@\aPVob