How source control management interworking can be achieved?

Question

While related questions have been asked before I would like to see an idea about how interoperability between two source control management (SCM) systems can be done. For example we could consider any SCM out there (Mercurial, Git, SVN, CVS, Perforce, ClearCase ...).

Mainly I'm interested if ClearCase can be used along with SVN or Git/Mercurial.

How can I have a remote ClearCase maintained source tree maintained by another SCM also (beside ClearCase)?

While others can use ClearCase we would like to use the 'other' SCM and commit changes in that repository. Changes in ClearCase repository should follow shortly or periodically (and also updating from ClearCase repository should be periodically in order to make sure we're having the latest sources)

Any (others/related) examples/experiences are welcome. Thanks !

PS: This is not about dumping ClearCase (I would do that gladly), it's about working with two source controls at the same time on the same source tree.

Answer 1

I really recommend against mixing them. Managing one SCM is a complex enough task that you don't want regular user to have to deal with several of them.

If you still want to mix, distributed SCM like Mercurial or git have something nice, which is the ability to use them without imposing them on anybody. Each developer / team can manage his local copy / local branch in git or mercurial with nobody aware of it.

git + subversion or mercurial + subversion have the advantage that pushing back to main repository is part of the tool, but one can live without it.

In your case, looks like ClearCase is forced on you but you want to use an alternative. You can decide to use git in your team, and regularly push the main branch to ClearCase.

Answer 2

one thing that comes to my mind is git-svn: "It provides a bidirectional flow of changes between a Subversion and a git repository."