[SulphurSmell]

I wish I could answer this. I have always had a penchant for any robust versioning system. Even the simple ones (CVS and the like) were amazeballs to me at the time. 20 odd years ago I spent a lot of time with ClearCase (initially Rational, now Rational IBM). I was amazed at what could be done. We had dozens of customers, maybe 3 major and 10-14 minor versions in the field, and probably dozens of "bug fix" or "special customer branches". Oh, and likely 2 or 3 on-going major version dev branches. Somehow, it all worked. If you could describe (by whiteboard or hand-waving) what you wanted to see as your working branch, it could be done. "Give me a view that is exactly what customer x has, but for this directory, give me latest, except for this file...I want that one from customer y" . And blam! The CC guys would make it happen. The magical config spec. I have had to dabble in many other SCMs.. SVN, Git, etc...and they all seemed to be a compromise. Or, just ran out of gas when the going got tough. In my mind, I wish I could argue that ClearCase was where it was at, and the patterns it supported would be wonderful to have today...especially over Git. But I don't know enough to defend the point. All I am saying is that even with enormously complex version scenarios, the damn thing didn't break and we all got our work done.

[Art_Wolf]

One reason we moved off it was because it was a bandwidth hog! I believe they had two clients to try and help with this, a thin and think client. Even with the thin one, with the CC servers hosted in the states and some developers located in Europe, it would take a half hour for the client to refresh and pull down the latest changes.

[SulphurSmell]

Interesting. It was never an issue for us, as we were close to the CC servers. Some folks were not, so they ran their dev/build locally ("network close" to th CC servers) and VNC'd in from their actual location. In that case, only the stuff on the screen had to transit the "far away" network. Although, I think today, network issues would be less of a thing...as I tend to think that networks have scaled faster than code base size. I could be horribly wrong about that though. Any centralized repo is going to have this challenge though. It also depends on if you prefer snapshot or dynamic views. Snapshots were much easier on the network, at the expense of consistency. I also remember the CC team could work magic at optimizing things if you gave them time and a bit of flexibility. Crappy config specs were hard to read, and often slow to work off of. Any config spec that I had to scroll...I knew I was in for a shit week.