Raising the Blood Pressure

[billroper]

Well, it appears that the fiasco with the Remote ClearCase check-ins on Friday is unfixable, so I had to destroy my view in order to save it. At this point, the ClearCase expert has suggested that I abandon Remote ClearCase and go back to using the regular version of ClearCase so I have access to the command-line tools in case something this stupid ever happens again.

So that's what I'm trying.

In the meantime, the hospital called today to schedule my surgery for Wednesday for which I need a history and physical. Fortunately, Dr. Bob had a hole in his schedule this afternoon, so I managed to get it done with him. Otherwise, I could have just gotten to the hospital earlier. That may have been the objective, given the notice that I was given. The good news was that they got my records from the other hospital where the surgery occurred which allowed us to skip the EKG and several blood tests.

The surgery is at 4 PM, supposedly outpatient, and I'm to have nothing to eat or drink after 7 AM. I predict that my mood by 4 PM will be interesting.

I had wanted to see Dr. Bob today anyway, as I was looking at a soft spot on the leg. He thinks it's not a problem, which is encouraging.

Meanwhile, as I typed this entry, the regular version of ClearCase has decided to choke and die as I try to check in the same file that failed on Friday.

"Choke and kill" is starting to sound like the right thing to do to our VOB server.

Comments

[mdlbear]

That's disgusting. A version-control system should just plain work. The thing I really like about CVS is that it's understandable -- if something goes wonky I can dive in with a text editor and damned-well fix it.

I'm getting the same feeling about git. It's all flat files, I understand what it's doing with hashes, and it's designed, built, and maintained by people who aren't resigned to working with flaky software. (It'll also drive you crazy if you expect it to work like any other VCS, but that's another matter.)

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

I have spent much of the last two years working directly with ClearCase, and have been the ClearCase team lead for our SCM team since January. So, obviously, I've spent much time working with ClearCase. I do have a very skilled set of top (or would it be bottom) level administrators who deal with much of it, allowing my team to focus on our customizations.

However, I do sometimes think that ClearCase is like the legendary little girl with the single curl in the middle of her forehead: When it is good it IS very good, but when it is bad, it IS horrible.

As an enterprise level revision control system it is very very good, better than anything else I've dealt with. But when it breaks, it can be very hard to fix, and if you want to do something that is outside of the (fortunately fairly broad) list of things that Atria/Rational/IBM thought of doing, it can be nearly impossible to get it done.