[wyldfire]

I'm immediately reminded of MVFS and clearcase. Lots of companies still use clearcase, but IMO it's not the best tool for the job. git is superior in most dimensions. From what this article says, it's not quite the same as clearcase but there's certainly some hints of similarities.

The biggest PITA with clearcase was keeping their lousy MVFS kernel module in sync with ever-advancing linux distros.

I really liked Clearcase in 1999, it was an incredible advancement over other offerings then. MVFS was like "yeah! this is how I'd design a sweet revision control system. Transparent revision access according to a ranked set of rules, read-only files until checked out." But with global collaborators, multi-site was too complex IMO. And overall, clearcase was so different from other revision control systems that training people on it was a headache. Performance for dynamic views would suffer for elements whose vtrees took a lot of branches. Derived objects no longer made sense -- just too slow. Local disk was cheap now, it got bigger much faster than object files.

> However, we also have a handful of teams with repos of unusual size! ... You can see that in action when you run “git checkout” and it takes up to 3 hours, or even a simple “git status” takes almost 10 minutes to run. That’s assuming you can get past the “git clone”, which takes 12+ hours.

This seems like a way-out-there use case, but it's good to know that there's other solutions. I'd be tempted to partition the codebase by decades or something.

[tcbawo]

I used Clearcase (on Solaris) in 1999 and was not a fan. It slowed our build times by at least 10x. I'm sure it was probably set up wrong, but this was a Fortune 100 company with lots of dedicated resources.

[foobiekr]

Clearcase performance for many builds was specifically impacted by the very poor performance of stat(). You could make very real improvements on build times by reducing the number of calls to stat(). It was sort of amazing.

Clearcase also suffered, at least in my experience, from a clumsy and ugly merging process and deeply unintuitive command set which meant everyone who "used clearcase" actually tended to use some terrible homegrown wrapper scripts.

Still, considering it was the last remaining vestige of the Apollo Domain OS, not bad.

[david-given]

I used Clearcase a while back in an office in China. Every few days there'd be an email going round pleading with people to keep their antivirus software up-to-date; because someone had a virus somewhere, and apparently the virus would try to infect executables on the Clearcase virtual drive, at which point Clearcase would obligingly check the infected file into the VCS and distribute it to all clients...