Whilst I hated clearcase as a version control system (and I mean 'fire and stakes' hate, not just 'crossO the road') - it did have one good trick up its sleeve:

Whilst I hated clearcase as a version control system (and I mean 'fire and stakes' hate, not just 'crossO the road') - it did have one good trick up its sleeve: Since the dynamic views into the source were implemented as a custom file system, they could track all the file access that went into building each object. They supplied a custom version of make that pulled that info. out to construct complete dependency descriptions. If you had the toolchain in clearcase as well, that would include all the compiler bins, libs and includes. Once that info was cached, and as they had code at filesystem level, it could easily be invalidated as files were touched. Another product of this mechanism was that if you tried to build something that someone else had already (all the same inputs), it would just grab it over the network. In practice this meant that the nightly build would cache the bulk of the object files.