Renaming a vob in Clearcase UCM , is it practicall

Question

We selected vob names aligned with our project name ( do not confuse project name with UCM project name) so that we can easily distinguish.

But recently our project name has been changed as we merge 2 products into one.

Some people suggested to rename the vob to indicate the project name.

We tried to analyze the impacts from development and build & release perspective.

There were very little changes, here and there we had to change the path variable to indicate the latest vob name.

So we agree for renaming the vob name.

Then as Clearcase admin i had to do impact analysis.

When i asked advice from senior Clearcase admin. They listed possible impacts such as below.

1. symlinks across vob will be broken so they may need to repair.
2. It is better to clear all check out items before changing the vob name
3. vob will be locked to prevent users from using the old vob name while name change.
4. Vobs has to be unmounted and remounted
5. Snapshot and CCRC views may be affected , so it has to be resynchronized.

and etc.

Has any one tried vob rename in your project? Can you share the practical impacts which you have faced which will be helpful for us?

If you already tried and decided not to do it again by any means , can you advice why it is not practically advisable to do so?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Most importantly, your UCM components won't work anymore: you cannot change their root directory (ie path within the vob, or vob itself), even though you can change their name (their "title").
And that is independent from UCM project name (the UCM project don't care about UCM rename, only the UCM Streams do)

Frankly, when face with this kind of refactoring, I:

• keep everything in place, but locked and in read-only
• start fresh with a new component/vob, importing the latest baseline.