I am getting the following error while compiling on ClearCase:
ERROR: Please freeze your view config-specs before invoking make.
I have created one branch and set config specs but I am still getting that error.
How would you resolve this issue?
The terme "freeze" generally refers (in this context) to a config spec which is not based on "LATEST".
LATEST is a shifting label which means it can move (while the make is in progress)
It is best to create a dedicate view which selects in its config spec a label
element * a_label
Each time you want to build:
set a new label (cleartool mklabel as in here or in this example) on your sources
lock the lbtype,
and modify the config spec of that view accordingly.
The view will be considered "frozen" (in that it does refer to frozen fixed versions), and make will be able to proceed in confidence.
Related
I would like to make a trigger that only executes for a single user(myself). The reason, is so that I don't "break the build".
Longer explanation: I'm trying to sandbox a Clearcase trigger to automatically apply an attribute to an element when it is checked in, and I don't want to accidentally create a trigger that applies to all developers and potentially ruin everybody's day with the prototype(what works on the first try?).
I see the -nus/ers option which seems to exclude users in the list. I suppose I could comma separate a list of all users, excepting myself. Is this what I'm looking for?
The best sources of information about triggers are listed here, and then EV (Environment Variables) are mentioned in mktrype man page.
Check for isntance:
CLEARCASE_USER
The user who issued the command that caused the trigger to fire; derived from the UNIX or Linux real user ID or the Windows user ID.
If the user id somehow doesn't work, you could consider other environment variables:
CLEARCASE_SNAPSHOT_PN
Your script can control if the user id is yours, and if not, abort.
The path to the root of the snapshot view directory in which the operation that caused the trigger to fire took place.
If your script detect that the path isn't the exact one expected (ie your snapshot view from which your triggered your script), said trigger script would abort.
When I try to switch to edit mode for a Report source, a popup comes up telling me
"A new task will be created for the following request of user XXX".
A transport request is also being suggested.
I don't want to save my changes in this request however, but in another existing one. I am not aware of any versioning systems being implemented in my system, and don't know how to check that.
Is what i'm trying to achieve possible? And if so, how?
No, this is not possible. There are very good reasons for this being an exclusive lock -- reasons that you should know about before you attempt to change anything. Briefly speaking
The CTS only notes that an object was touched, not what change was made.
When the transport is released, the entire object in its current state is exported - there is no delta/diff logic involved.
Therefore you can't separately transport changes to the same development object. Furthermore, if you serialize this manually, the second transport will always comprise the changes of the first one.
Things get slightly more complicated with partial objects - you can have LIMU METH objects (methods of a class) in different transports, but as soon as you try to lock the R3TR CLAS main class, you'll have to resolve that.
Within my 'Pending Changes' view I see this :
What are 'Pending Patches' and how are they created ? I think someone may have inadvertently created it. I do not seem to have the options to see what files have changed, should I not have this option ?
A pending Patch is a diff waiting to be applied in your local workspace.
It can be the result of a merge, or the explicit removal of a changeset ("Suspend"), put aside as a "Patch" (again, a diff), in order to clear the current local workspace of a modification you don't want to apply just yet.
You can also create one when accepting an incoming changet:
Accepting a change set will work when all previous change sets it depends on are present in your repository workspace.
When one of those change sets is missing then there is a gap in history.
RTC SCM prevents an accept from completing in this scenario.
There are two options to get the change into your repository workspace:
Accept the change sets that will fill the gap. This may be as simple as accepting all incoming changes if the change set you want is in your incoming changes.
Accept the change set and select the option to accept as a patch.
This will create changes that you can merge into your Eclipse workspace and check-in. A new change set would be created that will not depend on the change sets that would fill the gap.
The Help page explains how to create a patch.
Note that there is no easy way to get the same feature in ClearCase.
See:
"Is there RTC-equivalent “Suspend mode” in ClearCase?"
"git stash equivalents in other revision control systems?"
Is it possible to access environment variables in the config spec in clearcase.
I have this code:
element /folder/... /main/current_branch/LATEST
I wish to set my development up so as that I can update the branch by simply setting some envvars. I would like somthing like this to work is it possible?
element /folder/... /main/$current_branch/LATEST
where $current_branch should return the current branch set in that environment variable.
AFAIK, that is not possible.
The way I handle that is by having templates that I fill in (automatically). But I also use separate views; views are disposable and I rebuild my views routinely (every week, every couple of weeks, sometimes a few times in a day if I need to be sure of the cleanliness of the builds).
I'd show you my scripts but there are a large number of them, and they're fairly intricately intertwined with each other and with the working environment we have (multiple but overlapping VOBs for each of a number of major versions of a number of products, with some parts of the config spec provided by CM and custom preambles to identify what I'm working working on). We've been using ClearCase for about 18 years now.
The net result is a config spec for a bug fix branch that looks like:
# #(#)$Id:243260.jleffler.toru.cs,v 1.1 2011/08/30 15:23:02 jleffler Exp $
#
# Config Spec for Bug 243260 - Blah, blah, blah, blah
element * CHECKEDOUT
element * .../TEMP.243260.jleffler/LATEST
mkbranch -override TEMP.243260.jleffler
#time 26-Jul-2009.00:00:00UTC-08:00
element /vobs/main_vob/... /main/LATEST
element /vobs/other_vob/... dist.1.00 -nocheckout
include /atria/cspecs/product/1.23/product-1.23.4
#include /atria/cspecs/product/1.16/product-1.16.8
element * /main/LATEST
The bit between the commented out time stamp and the catch-all rule is provided by CM. The bit above the time stamp is custom to the branch (TEMP.243260.jleffler — which identifies it as a temporary branch, the bug fix which it is for, and who is doing the work). The template actually lists about 10 different config specs from CM, and I just delete the ones that aren't relevant. The view name is based on the bug number, my login, and the machine where it's created (toru). I've disguised most of the rest, but it is based on a bug cspec that I created earlier today. My bug.view script took the bug number, a description, the path for the view working storage, and the VOBs where I needed the branch created and went off and set everything up automatically. (And I'm still archaic enough to use RCS to keep my cspecs under control.)
Some of my views last a long time (by name). For example, the current release reference view will survive for the 5+ years that the release will be supported. It'll be rebuilt hundreds of times over that period, but the name remains the same: prod-1.23-ref.jleffler.toru. So the cspec for that will change over time, as different work is needed, but the basic cspec is three lines — CHECKEDOUT, include standard CM provided configuration file, and LATEST.
No, I never saw a config spec based on environment variable.
I looked at config_spec man page, writing config spec and "How config spec works": none refer to that possibility.
For dynamic view, I saw script modifying the config spec dynamically, based on an environment variable, using cleartool setcs (since the refresh would be near instantaneous with a dynamic view).
Note: don't forget that your current_branch might not always derive directly from /main. I prefer using the syntax:
element /folder/... .../my_branch/LATEST
in order to select my_branch, without depending on its direct "parent" branch (even though, in base ClearCase, there is no real "parent" branch).
I've previously documented my opinions on Clearcase as a source control system, but unfortunately I am still using it. So I turn to you guys to help me alleviate one of my frustrations.
We have just moved from a one-branch-per-developer system, to a one-branch-per-task in an attempt to improve some of the issues that we've been having with determining why certain files were changed. Generally I am happy with the solution, but there is one major issue. We are using simple scripts to start and end tasks which create a new branch named with the username and task number and then updates the local snapshot view to have a config spec similar to the following:
element * CHECKEDOUT
element * .../martin_2322/LATEST
element * /main/LATEST -mkbranch martin_2322
load /Project/Application
Let's say that my project has two coupled files A.cs and B.cs. For my first task I make changes to A on the branch. Then I need to stop working on task 2322 for whatever reason and start work on task 2345 (task 2322 is not finished, so I don't merge it back into main).
I create a new task branch 2345, edit both A.cs and B.cs and merge the results back into main. Now I go back to work on 2322, so I change my config spec back to one defined above. At this point I see the A.cs file from the task branch (as I edited it earlier, so I get the version local to that branch) and the latest version of B.cs from main. Since I don't have the changes made to A.cs on the 2345 branch the build breaks. What I need instead is to be able to pick up task 2322 from where I left off and see it with the old version of A.cs - the one that was latest in main when the branch was created.
The way I see it I have a few options to fix this:
Change the config spec so that it gets files from main at the right date. This is easy enough to do if I know the date and don't mind setting it by hand, but I can't figure out how to automate this into our task switching scripts. Is there anyway to get the creation date of a branch?
Create a label for each branch on main. Theoretically simple to do, but the labelling system in our install of CC is already collapsing under the weight of a few hundred labels, so I don't know if it will cope with one per developer per branch (notice that the task in my example is 2322 and we're only about an quarter of the way through the project)
Merge out from main into the task branch. Once again should work, but then long running branches won't just contain the files changed for that task, but all files that needed to be merged across to get unrelated things working. This makes them as complicated as the branch-per-developer approach. I want to see which files were changed to complete a specific task.
I hope I'm just missing something here and there is a way of setting my config spec so that it retrieves the expected files from main without clunky workarounds. So, how are you guys branching in Clearcase?
A few comments:
a branch per task is the right granularity for modifying a set of file within a "unit of work". Provided the "task" is not too narrow, otherwise you end up with a gazillon of branches (and their associated merges)
when you create a config spec for a branch, you apparently forget the line for new elements (the one you "add to source control")
Plus you may consider branching for a fix starting point, which would solve the "old version of A.cs - the one that was latest in main when the branch was created" bit.
I know you have too much labels already, but you could have a script to "close" a task which would (amongst other things) delete that starting label, avoiding label cluttering.
Here the config spec I would use:
element * CHECKEDOUT
element * .../martin_2322/LATEST
element * STARTING_LABEL_2322 -mkbranch martin_2322
# selection rule for new "added to source control" file
element * /main/0 -mkbranch martin_2322
load /Project/Application
I would find this much more easier than computing the date of a branch.
do not forget you can merge back your task to main, and merge some your files from your finished task branch to the your new current task branch as well, if you need to retrofit some your fixes back to that current task as well.
You can get the creation date for a branch by using the describe command in cleartool.
cleartool describe -fmt "%d" -type martin_2322
This will printout the date and time that the branch was created. You can use this to implement your first option. For more information, you could read the following cleartool man pages, but hopefully the above command is all you need.
cleartool man describe
cleartool man fmt_ccase
We use Clearcase, and we find that creating a branch for a release is often much easier than doing it by task. If you do create it by task, then I'd have a 'main branch' for that release, and branch the tasks off that branch, and then merge them back in when finished to merge them back to the trunk.