CLEARCASE: How do you keep tracking the upstream version

Question

My current employer uses clearcase (I believe Base-CC) for version control. Our project has a branch, and each user has his own branch on top of it. The configspec of the users shows elements from the user branch, then from the project branch, and then from the company-wide branch.

The current modus-operandi, is that the users merge in their changes back to the project branch, and keep working on their own branch.

The problem is, that after the user merges his changes, he still has a branch for this element. Then, when the someone else modifies the project, he still sees his outdated version.

I want the following:

• if a user has a checkedout file, display it.
• if a user has unmerged worked, display it.
• if a user has merged work, show the lastest version from the project

I thought of marking the element branch as obsolete after each merge, but the users still sees it, and not the latest from the project.

Then I thought of changing the config spec, to somehow ignore merged-in branches, but I do not know how to do that.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can reuse your personal dev branch, but the correct workflow, when a dev merges his/her branch to the upstream branch (here the project one) is:

• first merge the project branch to the personal dev branch
• resolve any conflict locally
• then merge personal dev to project.

That way:

• you don't have to modify the config spec after each merge,
• you make sure the merge will be a trivial one,
• and the personal dev branch can represent easily the LATEST from the upstream branch after merging (again) the project branch to the personal dev branch: the delta will be minimal.