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question asked: Nov 29 '12, 2:18 p.m.
question was seen: 4,140 times
last updated: Dec 03 '12, 4:57 p.m.

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Can 2 developers share an RTC local sandbox or tracked sandbox?

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Deena Stein (15●4●6) | asked Nov 29 '12, 2:18 p.m.
We are implementing RTC for a small distributed project. There are only 2  developers for this project and they have no source control in their current environment. Right now they both make changes directly to the same dev environment. They want to continue to make their changes in this shared dev environment (using that environment as their local sandbox).

We know that they can't both use the same sandbox, because we get locking errors when both try to open simultaneously. We also tried to use the "tracking sandbox" preference to have  RTC  "listen" for changes in a shared external sandbox. We have successfully made the "tracking" work:  when we make changes, we can see those changes in pending changes in RTC. But when we try to have 2 developers work in the same tracked sandbox, we get error messages saying that the sandboxes are locked by an unknown process.

Has anyone successfully allowed more than one developer to either share a local sandbox or to make changes to the same "tracked" sandbox? If so, how did you make it work? (We are willing to do this with either the eclipse client or the VS client if we can make the sharing work.)

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Chris McGee (505●1●11●17) | answered Nov 29 '12, 4:56 p.m.
FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER
Sandboxes are locked by a particular SCM client instance (Eclipse Client, VS Client, CLI) preventing other client instances from working with them. This doesn't prevent other non-SCM programs from accessing those files and making changes (e.g. text editors).

When using external programs there are extra precautions that should be taken to avoid data loss (e.g. enabling the source control shed, refreshing before performing SCM options such as accept and check-in). There is an article on this topic:

https://jazz.net/library/article/531/

That being said, sandboxes are generally assumed to be used by only one user there can be only one person on one RTC client that accepts new changes, merges conflicts, checks-in new changes. Perhaps if the team picked a single person to manage these SCM tasks and they were in tight collaboration it might work. This person would need to be fully aware of what files the other person has changed so that they can check them in, associate work items and perform merges on their behalf.

This is starting to sound alot like pair programming. If this is in fact the goal then both users could work in the same client/IDE with no need for shared sandboxes.

Otherwise, it might work alot better if each team member has their own sandbox and repository workspace.
Deena Stein selected this answer as the correct answer
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Deena Stein commented Dec 03 '12, 4:57 p.m.

Thanks, Chris. Good response and we reviewed it. In the end, we decided to provide a separate sandbox for each developer.

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