Re: Import ClearCaase with history?

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 06:33:09AM -0500, David Hagood wrote:

I am trying to drag where I work into a more modern software development
process, but I am getting resistance from one division that has a large
amount of history for some projects in a Clearcase repository. If I
could show them that we could import all that history into git, it would
go a long way to removing that resistance.

I've seen programs that purport to import Subversion (which is also
good, as they also are using Subversion for other projects....) but do
any such programs exist for Clearcase?

I know that, in theory, it would be possible to 
  for all checkins to Clearcase
     check out of Clearcase
     check into git
  done

but that would take an incredibly long time in practice, wouldn't it?

I don't think you can build anything which will import from ClearCase 
*without* loosing *some* history. At least I have build a script which imported
something from CC into git in my former job and allow me to sync bidirectional
with CC. 

The problems where no bidirectional mapping exists are the following:

  - CC is file based, where as GIT is tree (the whole repository) based

  - This leads to problems where you merge a file on differen CC branches,
    because in GIT a merge is only on the whole tree, so at least this
    information is lost. (see cleartool lstree for a file with merges)

Peter