[...]it is a bug (bug # 7252), this one was logged in the States.
It is scheduled for ClearCase 3.3, but this doesn't necessarily mean that the bug will be fixed within that version.
However, it seems that this might well be affected by our use of soft mounts (see esp. the automount man page).
One uses touch from either clearmake or clearaudit. Sometimes --not always-- one gets a two-line warning such as:
cleartext setattr failed view=girod_beta vob=/vob/tms-os/experimental dbid=0x800002c4 - No permission match
cleartext pname= /nfs/jeeves/lun2/viewstore/store1/girod_beta.vws/.s/00015/55e1a71c.02c4.foobar
As such, this seems innocuous, and doesn't prevent the build from succeeding. Such warnings were reported already in spring 98 (first logged record on June 6th).
More recently (this summer), these double warnings started to show up in pairs (mentioning the same hexadecimal value for dbid). This was however spotted as an error and interrupted the builds!
Touching files is used in our build procedure to produce tag files (empty files to which are attached config records; this is important for us to record the identity of makefiles used, for labeling purposes. Makefiles are intentionally not recorded in normal DOs config records).
The problem shows up only when touching an existing file, and doesn't depend on this one's ownership. This occurrence was very frequent in our builds until this autumn, especially in conjunction with the building of external objects (objects built with an other makefile). It is far less frequent now --using our recent makefile components, latest validation still pending.
The workaround is to remove the existing
tag files, with the unix rm command, in every view referencing them,
and finally, as their reference count has dropped to zero, with ct rmdo.
Note that this doesn't solve the case when the same tag file is
touched several times in a row during the same build, which is still
possible e.g. for libraries.
The case was reported to Rational on September 28th.