eclipse + Accurev = 42 ??

I downloaded the latest jre to use with eclipse. Yes, Accurev had installed a jre, and once upon a time I would have used that jre. Or at least would have tried to use that jre.

There are times where I try to keep the total tools install as small as possible and others where I try to keep each tool as self-contained as possible. At the moment I am going through the latter type of phase. So one jre for eclipse and a different one (different version) for Accurev.

Eclipse reminds me greatly of Rational Rose. As eclipse was developed at IBM Canada and Rational are an IBM company maybe that is no surprise.

To many, perhaps most, people the comparison will be seen as a complement. I'm not sure I mean it as one. I have very mixed feelings about Rose.

So I'm using eclipse with the Accurev bridge for eclipse and Accurev. Accurev is an excellent tool and the Accurev bridge certainly works well. It seems to be by far and away the easiest SCM integration to add to eclipse. The subvserion integrations in particular require far more work.

But at the end of the day, you are still using eclipse.

First thoughts on Accurev

I've just installed Accurev.

On a Linux box as the server and a client. And on a XP box as just a client.

Admittedly, the "boxes" were actually virtual machines running on Sun's xVM VirtualBox software - my favourite free PC Virtualization software. At the moment, anyway. Starting up an XP image on a PC running XP is much faster than booting the XP machine!

Anyhow, back to Accurev.

It is was a very smooth installation. As you'd expect from a commercial application. The installation begins by listing what will happen, and ends by showing you the same list with the success status of each item. A very favourable installation compared to the installation of Subversion a couple of months earlier. Installing Subversion wasn't bad experience, mind! Just not as polished as Accurev.

I took screenshots all the way through the install process with the aim of throwing them up on the web, but frankly I do not think it is necessary. Unless you are an irredeemable newbie, it is just so straightforward. Just "Click Next to continue". Well... Almost. There was a small amount of text to type in.

Perhaps the only benefit from showing you a screen shot would have been to demonstrate that the two installations were essentially the same. A benefit of Java technology!

The one thing I had to remember was to copy the keys.txt licence file I was sent by Accurev to the /opt/aacurev/storage/site_slice/ directory to overwrite the empty keys.txt file already there. Once done, I was licensed.

I've only been using the client for a couple of days now. Again it is looks and feels the same across the two platforms. Again the benefit of using Java. Having used ClearCase and Attache on *nix and Windows for 13-ish years now, I'd have to say that any ClearCase user would feel at home.

Adding files and directories is straightforward. Promoting those files to the parent stream was also quite straightforward. I might not have that terminology quite correct just yet. However, by comparison to Perforce it seems much more userfriendly. That also might not be fair on Perforce. We haven't paid maintenance on Perforce since , well probably since 2002!

That's that for now. I'll keep posting on my progress.

SCM @ home

I've started a project at home - homework if you will. It will require both database design and and web programming. As with many others projects, I'll use MySQL as the target database and PHP as the web language. I'll possibly also create a client, perhaps utilizing mono, or maybe just Perl/TK.

I decided to use an SCM. It was going to be Accurev, indeed the title of this post was originally going to be "Accurev in Anger." However, I've just checked out the Accurev website. Apparently the previous 2-person free download is no longer available. I checked out the websites of a number of other SCM vendors: PureCM, Perforce, PlasticSCM and IBM (for ClearCase and Team Concert.) Perforce appear to be the only company still providing that kind of long term small scale evaluation without requesting the inside leg measurement of your Mother's first cousin's girlfriend's sister's hairdresser's cockateel. Well, in addition to ClearCase, Perforce is also used at work, although not by a software development team. I do not want to use it at home.

Consequently, it looks like I'm going to be using Open Source. Well, there's quite a choice of those too. Might as well be Subversion with the TortoiseSVN client. Bazaar or Mercurial or Git might have been more "with it" or edgy or out there, but as its just me the initial attraction is to actually get things done.

I've downloaded and installed the server and client. Now to start writing some code.

Software configuration management software

I've been using ClearCase for approx. 13 years. I've been there, done that, and got quite a few Atria, Pure Atria, Rational and IBM T-Shirts over the years. Not to mention a few conference rucksacks and even a pint glass! Just recently I was reading Linux Magazine and read about another new software configuration management (SCM) tool, PureCM. Which interested because...

I was at an IBM seminar recently and saw some presentations about Rational Team Concert (RTC) for the first time. I was reminded of a bunch of presentations given 6, 7 or 8 years ago by Rational/IBM - my account manager at the time had told me that they were going to consolidate their tools so that there would only be a couple of tools left. Everything went quiet for such a long time I thought that the idea had been shelved or that someone had realized that having half a dozen to a dozen point tools at a slightly lower price would generate more revenue than a couple of more expensive tools. So it does now look like ClearCase, ClearQuest, ReqPro and a few other tools have now effectively been superseded by RTC. Although you can plugin ClearCase, ClearQuest and ReqPro to RTC the best reason I can think of for doing so is to ease the migration to the new tool.

So given that you are going to start again with a new tool, why not play the field and see what else is out there.

If you are going to pay for the tools then the two SCM tools that I would consider in addition to Team Concert would have been Accurev and PlasticSCM.

I've long wanted to actually put Accurev through its paces in anger. Its implementation of streams is far superior to that of ClearCase UCM, which can be considered some sort of half-*rsed after-thought. Although UCM has gotten smoother recently. From friends who have used Accurev in anger, I've heard that it does enable multi-site use of a single branch without resorting to some of the nasty hacks that have become second nature to ClearCase old-timers. The reduction of merges and regression testing builds that must provide might well be sufficient to consider or investigate a migration.

The feature of PlasticSCM that first caught my attention was the security model, which again was far superior to that of ClearCase. ClearCase, and DSEE before it, were designed by old time UNIX engineers and so utilized the octal user, group,others builtin permissions. PlasticSCM utilizes ACLs, like you'll find in Active Directory, which can be applied to almost any item: elements; streams/branches; individual versions; labels; etc. So much more flexibility.

But looking at the documentation for PureCM, it looks like it might be an acceptable alternative. Given that the tool apparently runs on Apples OS X, Linux, Solaris and Windows it is interesting that the feature comparison they chose to make was with VSS. I suspect that Windows may have been their most successful platform to date. The changeset functionality seems similar to that of Perforce. The builtin issue tracker is similar to Trac. The plugins for CruiseControl and FinalBuilder (a new tool for me - one I'm going to have to take a look at) are also a step in the right direction as RTC has built in build management - actually rather sophisiticated build management.

I do not have a conclusion. There isn't a prescription that all can take. Which is one reason there are so many SCM tools out there. This article is really another starting point for further blogs I'll be writing.