Today's appalling ClearCase discovery is that teams working on one project from different sites must each have their own branches, and must constantly merge the changes from the other sites' branches into their own. Taken to its logical extreme, that would mean that, if a project such as GNOME used ClearCase, we would need hundreds of branches. Add to this that branching itself is incredibly broken and difficult in ClearCase, and that ClearCase is I-wonder-if-it-has-crashed slow.

ClearCase's sole purpose is to make my life difficult. The company could save vast amounts of money by using cvs/subversion/etc and employing an unskilled worker to kick me repeatedly in the balls. They'd get the same effect, with the adding bonus of occasionally developing some software.

I try to stop myself ranting about ClearCase, because the rest of the world obviously doesn't care, because the rest of the world is obviously not insane enough to be using it. But every day ClearCase makes the case against itself so powerfully that I have to vent now and then. This page is a kind of support group.