fact

Purpose and features

FireAphisClearerTool (FACT) is a small project intended to make a life with ClearCase UCM a little bit happier. The project tries to achieve the goal in two ways:

1. Create an intuitive front end for IBM Rational ClearCase SCM.
2. Create a library that simplifies the process of development of scripts that interact with ClearCase.

IBM Rational ClearCase comes bundled with two user interfaces: one graphical and one command line based. Both, in my humble opinion, impact user productivity severely. The graphical interface requires unreasonable amount of mouse clicks for simple tasks, it doesn't support keyboard input, its output is obscure, it is inconsistent and it is ugly. The command line tool tries to solve all the problems in the world thus having a very complicated syntax and an enormous amount of commands and options.

From my personal experience, I tend to perform same tasks over and over again. Each time I have to choose between tedious and cluttered GUI and looking through my notes for the correct combination of over sophisticated command line commands.

This tool allows to perform the most common tasks in minimal amount of clicks and supplies only the necessary information in the most readable format, I could think of. Hope you will enjoy it too.

The tool is intended for the UCM version of ClearCase.

CLI

By executing fact the user enters the CLI mode. This mode is designed to support common use cases. It is supposed to make the job done in minimum key presses and without the need to remember numerous commands.

Here's the current menus hierarchy of the CLI mode:

  |
  +-- Create and set an activity
  |  
  +-- Browse undelivered activities
  |     |
  |     +-- Activity change set
  |           |
  |           +-- File information
  |                 |
  |                 +-- Change set predecessor diff
  |
  +-- Browse hijacked files
        |
        +-- List of hijacked files
        |     |
        |     +-- VOB version diff
        |     |
        |     +-- Undo hijack of a single file
        |     |
        |     +-- Check out and keep the changes of a single hijacked file
        |
        +-- Check out and keep the changes of all the hijacked files

Dependencies

The tool requires Ruby, ClearCase cleartool (comes bundled with ClearCase) and HighLine gem (http://highline.rubyforge.org/). Cleartool has to be on your PATH.

Tested with the following versions:

• CentOS 5.3
• Ruby 1.8.5 and 1.9.2
• HighLine 1.6.1
• IBM Rational ClearCase 7.0.1

If you run it on different versions, let me know, so I can update the list.