How to best set up Mercurial on a Clearcase static view? (Set up "checkout" hooks?)

Question

I'd like to set up a mercurial repository in a clearcase static view directory. My plan is to clone from that directory, do all my real work in a mercurial repo and then push my changes back to the shared Hg/Clearcase dir.

I'd like to hear general suggestions on how this might work best, but I foresee one specific problem: Clearcase locks files as read-only until they are checked-out. They way I'd like it to work is to set up a mercurial hook to checkout the file before the push is completed and roll-back the push if the checkout doesn't work.

Should I be looking at the pretxncommit hook? Or the pull hook? Also, I'm not quite clear on how to write the actual hooks either. I know the clearcase command, but I'm not sure how to contruct the hook to pass in the filename for each file in the changeset.

Suggestions?

Answer 1

The question I just answered 2 days ago: How to bridge git to ClearCase? can gives you an illustration of the process.

I like to take the ClearCase checkout/checkin step separate from the DVCS work:
I will unlock files as I need them within the DVCS repo (made directly within the snapshot view), and then update the snapshot view, which will tells me the "hijacked" files (which I can the easily checkout and checkin through the cleartool update GUI).

But if you have clone you DVCS repo somewhere else, and push it back to a local repo which is not the ClearCase snapshot view, what you could do is simply copy back the view.dat hidden file of your snapshot view at the root directory of the DVCS repo.
That simple file is enough to transform back the local repo in a ClearCase snashot view!
Then you make all the files read-only (except those modified after a certain date, i.e. the time when you started working), to avoid ClearCase considering all the files as hijacked.
The rest is similar to the first approach: update, checkout/checkin.