( ESNUG 381 Item 7 ) -------------------------------------------- [11/08/01]
Subject: ( ESNUG 380 #2 ) Synchronicity, Clearcase, Cliosoft SOS, Perforce
> I'm interested in some revision control software. I searched DeepChip.com
> site in detail on this issue. Synchronicity seems to have a lot of issues.
> Clearcase seems hard to work with if you have not worked with it before.
> I saw some articles on SOS from Cliosoft but these were really old postings.
> Our company is looking for a tool that will support backend layout process
> also. I'd like to know which version control tool is a good choice today.
>
> - Vijay Govindarajan
> Quicksilver Technology San Jose, CA
From: Anders Nordstrom <andersn@nortelnetworks.com>
Hi John,
I am currently using ClearCase for revision control and I have used
DesignSync from Synchronicity in the past. I had several technical issues
with DesignSync such as a corrupted database and being unable to access the
latest version of files. This was over a year ago. I am sure Synchronicity
fixed these issues but it caused me to switch to ClearCase at the time.
Both ClearCase and DesignSync are like RCS in that you check out a file in
order to edit it and then check it in so that others can view and edit it.
Where I see a major difference is how the files you see and can access are
updated.
In DesignSync, you get the files to your work area, or in their terminology,
you populate your work space. That is you have to manually update the files
you want to access to a certain version. You can populate with the latest
version or by a label you have set on a previous version of files. One
advantage is that you control when you want the files you access to be
updated so your simulation will not crash because someone checked in a file
with a syntax error. A drawback is that you can potentially have files that
are way out of date and if you want to make sure you are (for example)
simulating with the latest version of all files, you have to execute a
populate command before every simulation. This adds to my simulation time.
In ClearCase, files are automatically updated to a version you specify. I
find ClearCase very easy to use but before you'll be productive with it you
must understand the concept of a view. It is not difficult, just their way
of describing the files you see. A view is all the files of a certain
revision that you can see and edit. It includes private files on your local
disk as well. You can set your view to the latest version of all files or
to all files with a certain label or all files as they looked a particular
day. When you set a view, files are automatically updated for you if someone
else change a file in the same view. This means that if you set your view
to latest you will never work with an out of date database unless you choose
to do it. If you don't want files to change, set the view to an earlier
version that is known to be good.
Another advantage with views in ClearCase is if several designers are working
on the same problem. If I have a VCD file with some changed files in my view
and someone else is going to work on them as well, they only set their view
to be the same as mine and now we see the same files. No need to copy files
back and forth!
In the past, we handed off gatelevel netlists to our ASIC vendors for layout,
so I can not tell how well either tool works for layout files.
- Anders Nordstrom
Nortel Networks Ltd. Ottawa, Canada
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: "Joseph Yoon" <jyoon@nortelnetworks.com>
Hi John
I found Cliosoft's SOS program to be an easy to use RCS and have used it to
manage our design files for our recent microchip. Based on my tutorings of
co-workers, it took on average 30 min for them to learn how to use the
basics of SOS. Technical support from Cliosoft was great. All of my
questions were handled promptly.
One thing to note though, I've only used SOS to manage text files. I've
never tried it on other types of file formats.
- Joseph Yoon
Nortel Networks
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: "Don Monroe" <don_monroe@tenornetworks.com>
John -
Our hardware group have been using Cliosoft for 3 years and haven't had any
major problems. Our software organization uses Clearcase but they have a
different use model than we do in hardware.
In the hardware group, we NEVER have a file being edited by more than one
person at a time and therefore never have to do a merge. Also, we never
create branches. These are the two main reasons the hardware group is
using Cliosoft rather than Clearcase. SOS (Cliosoft) is much simpler and
costs less than Clearcase.
Our software group, on the other hand, uses MERGE and BRANCHES all the time.
They also make heavy use of ClearMake (parallel) while we in hardware just
use Unix (Linux) Make and LSF. They also have a full time Clearcase
administrator (which seems to be required.)
- Don Monroe
Tenor Networks
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: Paul Mitchell <paul.mitchell@pobox.com>
John,
I've worked with Synchronicity and Clearcase in the past (as well as plain
old RCS, CVS, VSS etc). We are currently using an RCS system by a company
named Perforce (http://www.perforce.com). This is by far the best RCS
system I have ever used. It is easy to administer, relatively easy to use,
and very well thought out. It does not have anything built in for backend
support, but it will store any kind of file, and is very easy to use from
within scripts. In addition, their tech support has been excellent.
- Paul Mitchell
ATI Research, Inc.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: "Tom Tessier" <tomt@hdl-design.com>
John,
As I explained to a client several years ago when they were looking for
an answer to your this problem. You could stick with RCS, which your
engineers hate; you could switch to CVS and pay me to write wrapper
scripts to make it work; or you could buy Cliosoft SOS and have
everything you need. They chose SOS.
Briefly the client mix that uses SOS are working on 1 Mgate ASIC's, FPGAs
and Systems. As a testament to the stability of SOS, I have a client who
is managing ~ 10K files using SOS 1.80b which was released over 2 years
ago. There have not been any bugs.
This same client is migrating other teams who are doing hardware design
over to the 2.40b version of SOS with the management of about ~3K files
and growing. This hardware design team had several tests which ran on
the PC (Windows 95) and SOS worked seamlessly. The database resides on
an HP-UX server with the clients a mix of PC's, Sun's and HP's. That
was one of the big differences between SOS and others is they have the
multi-platform approach working.
For my clients I manage repositories from a Linux Server and allow my
clients and other subcontractors access via the SOS client software.
They can be on any of the supported platforms and integrate with the
database. This has allowed me to hire subcontractors from around the
world to work on my projects.
The Ease-of-Use cannot be overlooked, this package can be mastered by
anyone in under 30 minutes. Sure there are operations that take a little
deeper understanding but 90% of the most common operations can be
learned in this 30 minute timeframe. For those of you familiar with Tags
ask yourself this question: "What does it take to move a tag on a group
of files with RCS/CVS/ClearCase and others?" In SOS you select the
group of files and hit the tag button; Pick a tag from the list and
select OK. Now all the selected files have the same tag.
Another problem that occurs is "It worked last week!" How do you get
back to that point? In SOS it has the ability to back up to a date and
time. This is very powerful in a multiple person environment.
Finally administration doesn't take a full time engineer to manage. You
do need someone who will take the time to study getting the environment
set-up; about 4 hours in most cases. You know engineers don't RTFM!
There are lots of options here, but the way that my clients and I have
used it is basically out of the box. Again a testament to the developers
of SOS thinking through the design and what is needed by HW engineers.
The SOS team has focused on Hardware Design Engineers writing HDL code
and everything that goes with the development of ASIC/FPGA and systems.
They have integration for Cadence and Visual HDL; I just started using
the Visual interface and it works great and supports binary formats.
Hardware Engineers don't want to use software approaches to data
management, SOS provides them a powerful tool to manage data.
- Tom Tessier
t2design Incorporated Louisville, CO
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