What are the differences between ClearCase and Visual SourceSafe

Question

Whats are the differences between ClearCase and Visual SourceSafe products?

Answer 1

What are the differences between clear case and virtual source safe products?

In the sense of "which one should I buy", the answer is neither. If this is a new project you're thinking about, there are superior alternatives that you should give serious consideration to, like Git and Subversion. VSS and CC both cost significant amounts of money, too, while Git and Subversion are free.

In the sense of differences in capabilities, they're really somewhat different products, but pretty equally terrible.

• Platform. ClearCase is multiplatform, supporting a number of Unixes as well as Windows. VSS is pretty much Windows-only. There are some bindings to connect to an existing VSS repo that other people have written, but these are third-party and there's no official support for them.

• Merging/renames. Handled decently in CC; not supported well in VSS.

• Replicate remote repositories. Sort of in CC; no in VSS.

• Deployment. Hard with your first CC instance at a site, slightly easier with subsequent ones; almost trivial with VSS (installer). [Update: ClearCase 7.1.1 now has a unified installer.]

• Networking. Bad on CC (requires very slow RPC calls); less horrible with VSS but still pretty bad (requires world-writable Windows network share and is still pretty slow).

• Atomicity. Neither VSS nor ClearCase support atomic transactions -- a major feature usually found in modern VCSs. [Update: ClearCase 7.1.1 now supports opt-in atomic transactions; it's not on by default for each commit.]

• Support. CC is well supported by IBM. VSS is officially still supported but between the lines, MS is encouraging people to move away from it to TFS. (That doesn't mean TFS is a good product, though.)

• Developer morale. Will likely decrease in both cases as people bemoan the introduction of yet another awful product into their process.

Seriously, use Git or Subversion.

Answer 2

If you got a big project don't bother VSS if you got a small project don't bother clear case.

Clear case, commercial uses heavy client tool (at least last time I used it 2006) requires a lot of management and sometimes goes corrupt due to complexity (my experience).

Havn't used it for a long time, but to my understanding, still not a full fledge version control system.

Personally I wouldn't use any of them if it was up to me, have a look at subversion instead.

Answer 3

You have a first answer in this thread, which mentions:

• the Ovum report
• cmcrossroads

The relevant questions for this kind of choice (hoping CC and VSS are not the only tools you have to consider) are:

1. how large will the team be?
2. where are the users located?
3. what platforms are they working on (e.g. Unix/Windows)?
4. how many variants in the code will they need to support (read branch and merging here)?
5. what technologies will they support (if you working on .net and C# then we should take a look at TFS which replaces the the old VSS from Microsoft)?
6. What kind of budget do I need to purchase and support?
7. How much training and administration will be required?

Answer 4

Clearcase is different from most other source control tools because it uses configuration specifications to look at file versions. It is a very powerful, high-end tool.

The down side is that its very expensive, requires a lot of support, and takes a while to learn.

Answer 5

Difference:

Clearcase sucks because it is too cumbersome. SourceSafe sucks cause it doesn't work well.