My family will be back in town tomorrow evening so I need to get the release candidate for the next GNU make release done this weekend. I promised myself I'd get it finished before they got back. It's so hard to sit down and do all the minutiae involved with a release, even with all the excellent supporting rules provided by automake etc. It's about this time that I always wish I had a better test suite framework: make is about the simplest program to write tests for you can imagine... it seems the working with the test suite is actually more difficult than writing the tests themselves, which is never a good thing.
RDP?
I've been trying to find a good spec for, or implementation of, a reliable packet-based protocol: RDP or whatever. None of them seemed to have really caught on though. I wonder why? If anyone has any pointers to good reliable packet protocols that are used and considered mature and stable, I'm interested. What the heck, I'm interested even if they're cool but not mature :).
ClearCase
sdodji, I have to disagree with a few of your comments on ClearCase. As a preface let me say I've never used the Windows version of ClearCase, but we've been using it on UNIXen for over 6 years, since CC 2.0. This is a free software forum so I don't want to get into a big discussion, and some of your comments are right on: it does require more admin commitment than other tools, and it does require very reliable and fast network and server hardware. I think many companies buy ClearCase that shouldn't: it is a very high-end tool. If you are willing to plunk down the $$ needed for licenses, then you should have enough to not blink too much at getting a good server and good network components.
However, ClearCase is not unreliable (again, on UNIX). We've been using the same server for about four years, with well over 100 developers using it and thousands of workspaces at a time and it has never crashed or hung. My Linux box at work as currently been up for 149 days. This is my main development system: I do tons of work on it with multiple views, both local and mounted from remote systems.
Also, you are certainly not forced to use their merge utility (their text based one is about the worst I've ever seen; the graphical tool is mediocre). I use GNU diff3 or Emacs ediff for all my ClearCase merging. Their findmerge command has a -exec option that lets you invoke whatever merge tool you want, no problem.