Conflict detection during checkin

Friday, December 21, 2012 Amalia merging 0 Comments

If you’re working on a shared branch (more developers committing to the branch you’re also using), chances are that at some point you’ll need to sync your workspace prior to complete a checkin.

You’re on changeset 12 of the branch:

Now you make some changes on your local copy that are not yet checked in to the branch.

At some point you decide to checkin but… another developer checkedin first, so you now have to merge from his changes first.

What’s the solution now?

So far you had to merge from changeset 13 into your workspace (what I drawn as cset 12’) and then checkin.

But, most of the times, fortunately, the changes made on “13” won’t collide with the ones you made on your workspace, so the merge wouldn’t be really necessary.

There are two options here:

• The first one is manually updating your workspace. If there are not conflicting changes, your cset “12’” will now start from 13 instead of 12 (changes are perfectly applicable there) so there’s no merge conflict anymore
• What we recently added to Plastic is the ability to do that operation automatically upon checkin: it will ask you if you want to update, and then it will complete the checkin.

The scenario after updating will be:

Actually, the dialog that the GUI will show is the following:

The title of the dialog is very explicative: “New files in the branch, update needed”. So, you can now update before checking changes because “ Since the changes in the branch don’t conflict with the changes in the workspace, you can simply update the workspace before checking in”

The following video summarizes this new feature of Merge and GUI.

Take care of your tasks!

Thursday, December 20, 2012 Luix best practices 0 Comments

As probably most of you already know, we at Codice Software use the Branch per Task development pattern. This has a lot of advantages for us; one of those is deciding what to integrate and where. This gives us a very flexible way to build new releases; it's like building customized releases, à la carte.

What I want to explain now is what a task means for us. The picture below depicts the task life-cycle:

Plastic SCM 4.1.10.382 Release is out!!

Monday, December 17, 2012 Amalia 0 Comments

A new release of the 4.1 version is out: Plastic SCM 4.1.10.382 has been released. All the new features and bug fixes of each Plastic SCM release can be found in the release notes page

Besides the full release notes, this blogpost will highlight some of them. Just in case you haven't downloaded this version yet you can do it here.

Bugs

Exclusive checkout is done on a non-matched item

When multiples items were checked out, and some of them had to be locked, all of them were locked wrongly. Fixed!

Directory differences is not showing anything

The directory differences for an checked out directory was showed an empty content on Plastic SCM 4.1.

Now, some issues have been fixed for the directory differences:

• "Index was outside the bounds of the array" error. It happened under some special conditions. Fixed
• The xlinks are properly handled on the differences. They are not shown as a file any more.
• The checked out directories were showing an empty content. Fixed

Performance

Merge Performance

Repair merge performance. It has been broken on BL378. Merge performance has been restored.

Plastic SCM Documentation

We supply documentation for the latest version and previous versions of Plastic SCM, in both online and offline (downloadable) form. This page provides links to all our documentation.

The following online guides has been updated: Office guide

RepliKate

Thursday, December 13, 2012 Ma Nu distributed 4 Comments

After accidentally cloning a sexy repository, two college grad students decide to educate the newly created script and turn it into the perfect Plastic SCM replication command. (Source: Repli-Kate)

CmdRunner background

Using the CmdRunner library, we created a small application for replicating a complete Plastic SCM repository. You can find the RepliKate code here.

What RepliKate does

You can use repliKate for two purposes:

1. Replicate a complete repository from one server to another.
2. Replicate all the changes done inside a repository in a period of time.

Manuel Lucio

I'm in charge of the Customer Support area.
I deal with complex setups, policies and working methodologies on a daily basis.
Prior to taking full responsibility of support, I worked as software engineer. I have been in charge of load testing for quite some time, so if you want to know how well Plastic compares to SVN or P4 under a really heavy load, I'm your guy.
I like to play with Arduino GPS devices, mountain biking and playing tennis.
You can find me hooked to my iPhone, skate-boarding or learning Korean... and also here @mrcatacroquer.

Plastic SCM 4.1.10.378 Release is out!!!

Monday, December 10, 2012 Amalia 1 Comments

We have removed this release from the downloads web page because we have detected a performance problem in the merge operation that could be noticeable when there are lots of items involved.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

We start new week, and we launch new release: this time we're announcing 4.1.10.372. It is a new release of the 4.1 version, including a big number of bug fixes and new features!!

While you can read the detailed release notes, this blogpost will highlight the most relevant features and bugfixes. Remember you can find the latest installer here.

Features

Update Merge Operation

The update merge was not handling the scenarios with changed xlinks or under the xlinked repositories.

Now, the update-merge operation can also work with writable xlinks when there are not conflicts in any of the involved repositories.

Bugs

Checkin Comments

This small bug was share in our forum. Thank you very much to our active forum members, who are always starting interesting threads.

The checkin recent comments were not being read correctly (from the disk file) when the comments contained the '_', '#' or '@' characters.

Diff View on Linux

Some lines that contain some special characters that can be handled as prefixes (such as: &) were not being drawn properly on Linux by the Differences Tool and the Merge Tool. Plastic SCM team discovered it was mono's issue. Fixed!

The Folder Icons on Repository Browser View

The folder icon was wrongly draw as an special icon, under some especial conditions, : unit icon, special folder icon, custom icon... Now the folder icon is always the default folder icon.

Shelve and Locks

When a shelve was applied the locks were not taken into account.Fixed!

Shelve and File Attributes

Thanks for reporting this bug and share it in Plastic SCM forum.

When a file is left as checked out by the shelve operation the readonly permission is properly removed.

Plastic SCM Documentation

We supply documentation for the latest version and previous versions of Plastic SCM, in both online and offline (downloadable) form. This page provides links to all our documentation.

The following online guides has been updated:

Admin Guide

Database Prefix: Plastic SCM permit to create prefixes for your database as with the suffixes. (Chapter 8)

Checkin changes to a different branch

Tuesday, December 04, 2012 Ma Nu 1 Comments

You have been working hard during all the afternoon, suddenly you realize that your workspace is not switched to the correct branch! The pending changes view is plenty of changes that should be committed in a different branch. How Plastic SCM can deal with this typical developer situation?.

Want to move your changes elsewhere?

You may know that we have two ways to avoid committing changes in the wrong branch.
The first one is the "Checkin changes to a different branch...", with this option you can commit your changes in a new branch, keeping the current one clean.

The second is the shelve operation, with this feature you can save the workspace changes in the Plastic SCM server and apply them later in any branch you want.

Check-in sub menu options

Already committed the changes?

If your changes are already committed in a wrong branch you can use the subtractive merge to "revert" the changes and keep the head branch as it was before committing the wrong changeset.

Now, the cherry pick merge is the key in order to place the changes to the right branch. Use the cherry pick to propagate the changeset content into the destination branch. Here you have an example of how the operation looks like:

Usage of the subtractive and cherry pick merge

The changeset #1 is the one we want to "move", the changeset #2 is the result of the subtractive merge (red merge link) and finally the changeset #3 is the the result of the cherrypick (purple merge link).

As you can see Plastic SCM has all the tools to save the day.

Manuel Lucio

I'm in charge of the Customer Support area.
I deal with complex setups, policies and working methodologies on a daily basis.
Prior to taking full responsibility of support, I worked as software engineer. I have been in charge of load testing for quite some time, so if you want to know how well Plastic compares to SVN or P4 under a really heavy load, I'm your guy.
I like to play with Arduino GPS devices, mountain biking and playing tennis.
You can find me hooked to my iPhone, skate-boarding or learning Korean... and also here @mrcatacroquer.

Plastic SCM 4.1.10.376 Release is out!!

Monday, December 03, 2012 Amalia news 0 Comments

A new release of the 4.1 version is out: Plastic SCM 4.1.10.354!!!

The features of each Plastic SCM release, up to and including the latest version, can be found in the release notes page.

Besides the full release notes, this blog post will highlight some of the new features. Just in case you haven't downloaded this version yet, you can do that here.

Features

Move Detection

This new feature was suggested on User Voice: Improve file move detection (compare only same extensions)

Now, the move search by similar content can be restricted to the same file extension for text files, binary files or both. By default, the binary files are restricted to process only the files with same extension.

On the GUI, this behaviour can be configured using the commit preferences. Looking the following figure:

On the CLI, this behaviour can be configured on the status command using the following parameters:

• --txtsameext: Only those text files that have the same extension will be taken into account by the similarity content matching process during the moved items search. By default any text file will be processed.
• --binanyext: Any binary file will be taken into account by the similarity content matching process during the moved items search.

By default, only those binary files that have the same extension will be processed.

Bugs

Branch Explorer: wrong key navigation with relevant changesets

On Branch Explorer View, navigation keys did not work properly when the "Display only relevant changesets" option was enabled. Fixed.

WebUI: remove repository description

The repository description has been removed so it was pointless.

WebUI: raw data

When downloading raw data of a .zip or .dll file, the name suggested by the Internet browser was "Raw" instead of the item name. Fixed: the name was only set if the content type was octet-stream, which was not correct.

Enjoy it!!