Well, where I was, they had a Godzilla-like conglomeration of perl scripts, all to create some elaborate personal branching scheme and all kinds of weirdness. And it took them forever to get it actually working. Let's just say it wasn't pretty.

It wasn't all that long ago -- somewhere in early '96.

Yeah, that's the other thing -- lots and lots of money.

Well, you have to change the config file to be able to use that "power", and where I was, they didn't even allow the developers to touch their config files. They had all kinds of elaborate tools on top of CC to prevent that very thing.

I occasionally want to actually look at a whole file at a different version, but just grabbing it through stdout is fine for me (the "-p" flag for most of those oldies but goodies SCM tools; not sure what it is for p4). Usually though, a diff against another version will do fine.

"Viewpathing?" I have no idea what that even is -- which says something about how useful it would be for me. What do it do?

It was probably the exclamation point that confused you. I should probably avoid using any kind of excitable punctuation.

I actually think SCCS is a reasonable little tool -- it does what it needs to do, in a pretty straightforward way. And people can pick it up pretty darn quick.

I wouldn't consider using it a "head whomp" by any means.

Now, Clearcase on the other hand, is a definite hammer to the head.

Sorry you missed my list of actual things earlier, but they were there. I really don't see any need to list them all again.

For another one -- how about an analogy? I'll grant you that you could, through an elaborate system of cables and winches and levers raise a D9 Cat over a nail, drop it, and probably get the nail into the wood -- but wouldn't a simple hammer do the job much quicker and easier?

With that, I think I've pretty much said as much about this as I feel Clearcase is worth taking the time to say.

And please remember: nobody says you have to agree with me.

Diane (dianeh at whistle.com)