Fell behind on the list as I’m real busy right now but I want to weigh in on this thread.
I’ll try to speak from my 16 year experience with implementing 3 different SCM packages for i (including RTC) instead of as a vendor.
If a new customer is already using an SCM package and is switching to a new package you would think it would be easier but generally there are a bunch of expectations that must be met,
If they don’t have anything but a process it’s usually easier.
I recently did an insurance company, 4 developers, in a week as they wanted a simple process (hint, not RTC).
If you want a complex workflow no matter what package you implement it will take longer.
RTC offers the best workflow customization and user experience for the TASK part of a workflow as others have pointed out.
When it comes to source, all the packages that I know of are pessimistic except for RTC.
Meaning that the first thing you do is a pessimistic checkout of the source for development which locks it to that developer.
There are provisions for concurrent development but it’s an exception process.
RTC comes from the Java world so it’s source control is optimistic, you make your change and resolve conflicts with other changes, merge source when you ‘Deliver’ back to the common branch (Stream).
So if your managing multiple versions of your software or have a mix of long term projects and short term fixes which causes concurrent change to happen RTC provides source line level management of that within the tool.
This means you get incredible flexibility in managing concurrent source changes, but with flexibility comes complexity.
In actual practice, in an i shop this is a WHOLE NEW WORLD to your average i developer. A lot of them have worked with SCM packages before but nothing like RTC.
When I’m training I have to start with optimistic source control practices first before I even get to the workflow they want.
Build and deploy your source changes…
The existing traditional SCM tools pretty much have this down, they all have strengths and weaknesses.
Generally they take the approach, if in doubt recompile.
I had one customer that was an early adopter of service programs, had all their file I/O modularized.
Unfortunately that meant that in most tools, if they changed a module that was in a service program that updated a popular file their whole world recompiled.
This is a situation where having a tool that has procedure level cross reference (like Arcad) makes a big difference.
The RTC dependency build currently supports file dependencies and copybook dependencies, I don’t know if and when it will support ILE dependencies.
They added management of CRTPGM type *PGMs and service programs in RTC 4.x by introducing pseudo source that essentially contains the compile command for the object and any referencing objects that is manually created and updated (see the i sample mail list project, QLNKSRC,
https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Main/RTCp40DependencyBuild).
The dependency information is updated by a nightly scanning process and can also be updated during the build.
Arcad has plugged into the RTC build process to extend it, but now things are getting expensive as you need RTC EE and Arcad licenses.
Deployment must be scripted in vanilla RTC, where other tools handle deployment mostly automatically.
One strange gap in RTC is SQL support, IBM has Data Studio for RDp, but no interface to RTC, I guess because the option to generate an SQL statement source is just that, an extra optional step.
The rest of the SCM tools manage SQL based objects as objects with source and handle deployment automatically.
One new wrinkle, in the interest of allowing case tool users (Synon, JDE etc) to use RTC there is a new workflow model where RTC provides the task (via Work Item) and collaboration and Arcad provides the SCM interface but uses the RTC Work Item to track those changes.
No EE license required in that case and those more traditional developers can still use 5250 for development.
Sorry to be so long winded
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