Migrating away from Clearcase

Question

We are migrating from Clearcase to another VCS (probably either SVN or Mercurial). For companies that have made this transition, what factors did they find important in sel

Answer 1

You need to take into account several criteria like:

• what kind of data policy can you support (strict central repository, with only part of it loaded on the developer workspace, meaning SVN)
• central or decentralized repositories, with full history duplicated? (DVCS like Mercurial or Git)
• what kind of merge workflow will you be likely to follow (long-libed branches with complex merges, or frequent rebase)

In term of migration (to SVN or Mercurial), it will be easier if you were using ClearCase UCM, because the baselines represent clear "timeline" (closest analogy to "revision") you can use to import in your other (D)VCS.
If not (Base ClearCase), you need to consider what portion of the history you really need to import.