Thursday, July 17, 2008

Making the ClearCase Remote Client (CCRC) Use a Real Merge Tool


I'm a Java developer (at least I occasionally write Java code), and most of the time the CleaseCase remote client running inside of Eclipse does everything I need for source code control.

The one complaint I have about CCRC in Eclipse is that it keeps using the old-looking and not very useful clearcase GUI for doing diffs and merges.

A few weeks ago someone pointed me to meld, a graphical gnome tool for doing merges and diffs. Meld works great, but I couldn't access it via clearcase - which is usually what I needed to do diffs.

So I wrote a script that can be used to modify the CCRC installation to use meld instead of the CCRC diff tool. It's available at:

http://employees.org/~mlepore/files/ccrc_meld

Note: as far as I know this works on Linux, and it might work on MacOS X, but I'm not sure how to make it work on Windows, because I think that Windows is looking for an .EXE file. Perhaps a batch file will work, but I haven't tried it.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you very much for this script. It is very useful.

Unknown said...

Thanks, this was precisely what I was looking for. However, on my configuration, ClearCase Remote Tool 7.0.1 names of plugins are slightly different. I just removed '_' in the plugins search path (plugins/com.ibm.rational.clearcase.
compare_merge.linux*/ccrc_xcleardiff) and it worked like charm

Troy Test 1234 said...

Thanks very much for this!

I have modified your script to allow Beyond Compare to launch from the CCRC.

My only note is that the script install fails on my system as the path to the CCRC merge tool has an additional .x86 in the directory name:

/com.ibm.rational.clearcase.compare_merge.linux.x86_7.0.1.D090225

This caused the installer to reject it, only a quick fix to the regex tho.

Awesome work! Thanks.

Leandro Pacheco said...

Thanks man! I couldn't get xcleardiff to work with my UTF8 locale on ubuntu... not having to use xcleardiff at all is MUCH better hehe

Michaƫl said...

Hello,

Thanks for your job. Unfortunatelly I still can get merging work on my clearcase installation.

I removed the '_' otherwise it couldn't find the path correctly, installed meld as well.

But eclipse still says to me "Failed to invoke the graphical merge tool"

I'm very stuck with this right now, I'll be gratefull if you could help !

KK said...

Hi Mike,
I have run into the same problem with CCRC and then I found your blog. But looks like the link to the ccrc_meld script is broken, request you to please post the script if you still have it.
It will be really helpful.
thanks,
KK