Release Notes

All platforms - Plastic: Semantic Visual Differences are here!

We ported the Visual Diff feature from the Windows Legacy GUI to the new (multiplatform) GUI, which means that now, the Visual Diff feature is available on three platforms, Windows, macOS, and Linux!

The Visual Diff is a diagram that helps to understand the changes made to a file, in a semantic way. Visual Differences are available for those file formats that support semantic differences (.NET, Java, PHP, C, C++). When the semantic differences are calculated, the Visual Diff displays a graphical representation of them. The diagram displays, classes, usings, methods, members, fields, etc, and some decorations indicating if an entity was added, changed, moved, or deleted. It also helps to display the differences between them.

The Visual Diff is available in three places:

1- The Diff Control (note that we also implemented a couple of options for the semantic diff):

* Skip format changes: This option ignores the indentation and EOL changes when the semantic diffs are calculated.

* Reformat: This option automatically reformats the source code:

2- The Diff Window, when clicking a Refactor Group when using our "analyze refactors" feature:

3- The Semantic Merge tool:

All platforms - PlasticX: Visual diff window new design

Some colors and layout design has been changed for the Visual diff window in order to improve legibility and visibility for both themes.

Linux - Plastic: removed mono-based GUI's

We finally removed the mono-based GUI's that were deprecated months ago, in favor of netcore-based counterparts: plasticgui and gluon.

This way we ease the setup of the Plastic SCM GUI applications, since no more "mono" and related packages will be a requirement anymore.

The final goal is to support newer distros, and for that goal, this removal of mono-based applications is a must.

REMARK: The package name was renamed from plasticscm-client-gtk to plasticscm-client-gui, but your package manager should care automatically of this renaming.

Linux - Client and Server: Added support for Ubuntu 22

Now you can install Plastic SCM on Ubuntu 22 using the package manager! Instructions here, "Ubuntu" tab.

Easy to say, long road until we made it! This Ubuntu 22 support pulls some relevant changes in the Plastic SCM software stack:

1. Mono removal: We don't require installing mono runtime anymore. We now rely on .NET specific OS-targeted self-contained executables for all Plastic SCM applications, even client-GUI applications (server was already compiled this way since early 2021).

2. Legacy GUI's removal (gtkplastic, gtkgluon, gtkmergetool). Since they were based in mono, they need to be removed and replaced by .NET counterparts: plasticgui and gluonx (mergetool is now part of plasticgui application and can be launched using plasticgui xmerge).

3. Move server from .NET 5 to .NET 6

All these changes were required in order to meet dependencies needs for Ubuntu 22, specially on ssl libraries and graphical toolkit libraries.

All platforms - PlasticX, GluonX: Damaged image file won't show error pop up in Pending/Checkin Changes Views.

Selecting a damaged image file won't show error pop up message in Pending Changes/Checkin Changes Views.

The error message will still be visible to the user as a label notification, and also in the Details Panel (GluonX only)

All platforms - GluonX: Visual feedback when cutting items

When cutting items from the workspace explorer view, now there is a transparency effect in the icon of the elements that have been cut.

This feature was already available on Plastic, and now it's on Gluon too.

All platforms - Plastic: Allow changing the editor font.

Now, the diff/merge font can be changed.

NOTE for windows users. The default monospaced font in Windows OS (if available) is Cascadia Code, which enables font ligatures, so if you want to disable them, you can change the font to use Cascadia Mono, or other available font in your system.

All platforms - Plastic: Full Unicode support and IME.

Previous versions of Plastic didn't fully support double-byte languages (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc ...). This Plastic version supports, not only double-byte languages and emojis, but also supports IME (Input Method Editor) for these languages, and right-to-left input support for Arabic and other languages.

NOTE for Open Suse Linux users: After this changes, Open Suse 15.2 is no longer supported. An upgrade to Open Suse 15.3 is required in order to run Plastic.

Server - Merge and Incoming Changes are much faster tons of ChangeDelete conflicts.

The calculation of the merge or the incoming changes was very slow when there were tons of ChangeDelete conflicts involved in the operation.

In the studied case, 2 million of items were added in the source of the merge but all of them were added under a deleted directory in destination. It initially took more than 2 hours to calculate the merge. Now, the same scenario takes less than 15 seconds to complete it. So, it's 500 times faster.

All platforms - PlasticX: added tooltip to Branch Explorer

Branches, changesets and labels on the Branch Explorer now have a tooltip which looks something like this:

.

Clicking the links on the tooltip will open a diff of the specified branch or changeset.

All Platforms - Command-Line Client: New information to display on revision history command

A new option has been added: --limit. It displays the N last revisions regarding the specified items. If N is bigger than the number of available revisions, it will display the existing ones (limit will take no effect); if N = 0, it will display every revision; if N < 0 the displayed list will be empty; if 0 < N < numRevisions will display the N most recent revisions, sorted by date and changeset id.

For example:

cm.exe hist foo.c bar.c --format='{path}: {itemid}' --limit=5

Will display the path and itemid regarding the last 5 revisions of foo.c and bar.c

foo.c: 8
foo.c: 16
bar.c: 12
bar.c: 13
bar.c: 15
bar.c: 21
bar.c: 24

Note that, in the example, foo.c only has 2 revisions.

All platforms - PlasticX: Changes in Semantic Merge Window

We changed the Semantic Merge Window icon, now the window will now show legacy Semantic Merge tool icon

We added MinWidth and MaxWidth properties to the window

All Platforms - Command-Line Client: New information to display on revision history command --format

Two more fields have been added to the revision history command in order to display information such as the revision size in bytes and the revision hash code. The --long option will also regard these new fields.

Now it is possible to use both {size} and {hash} in order to display that information along with the --format option.

For example:

cm.exe hist ./dir/foo.c bar.c --format='{path}: {size} bytes ({hash})'

Will display the review history of both foo.c and bar.c files, outputting the item id, the size of the file at each specific revision and, in between parenthesis, the hash code identifying the content of each revision.

./dir/foo.c: 5 bytes (RKaq9oJlXsU2xCXiO7zSjg==)
./dir/foo.c: 15 bytes (qNJWW77XzCApIMdT13jzkw==)
./dir/foo.c: 203 bytes (NnqIk33R+eUMaewTjAVrqQ==)
bar.c: 2031 bytes (aaHWt78weCApIMHa53jz22==)

In addition, the --long format will also display the new fields:

cm.exe hist bar.c --long

Will display something like the following, considering bar.c file had only 1 revision:

REVISION HISTORY OF C:\wkspaces\default\bar.c
--------------------------
Revision spec: bar.c#cs:1
Located on branch: /main
Created: 9/27/2022 17:53
Revision type: txt
Changeset number: 1
Owner: newuser
Repository: default
Server: localhost:8084
Repository spec: default@localhost:8084
Data status: Available
Item ID: 21
Item path or spec: bar.c
ItemSize: 2031
Item hash code: aaHWt78weCApIMHa53jz22==
Comment: bar.c now is managing HTTP connections

All Platforms - PlasticX, GluonX: Application Zoom Support

You can now apply a zoom level to the whole application!

Change it via the ⋮ (triple vertical dot) menu on the top right corner -> Zoom or by pressing Ctrl + Plus, Ctrl + Minus, to increase or decrease the application zoom.

All platforms - Plastic: Added text editor options.

Now, the diff tool and the merge window have new options to customize the text editors. Those options allow to:

- Show/hide the tabs and the whitespace.

- Show/hide the line ending (EOL) characters.

- Convert tabs to spaces while editing.

- Customize the indent size (tab size) to 4 or 8 characters.

- Add column rulers.

Demo:

Command-line client: New env variables in codereview edit

Previously there was no way to create a [before | after]-editreview trigger and retrieve

information about what editing was being done: the assignee or the status or both of them.

Now there are two new environment variables related to [before | after]-editreview triggers:

PLASTIC_REVIEW_ACTION: edit assignee or edit status or both separated by ';')

PLASTIC_REVIEW_ACTION_INFO (detailing "previous value" "->" "new value" for the assignee, the status or both, separated by ';').

Mind that only when editing the code review from the CLI both fields can be edited at the same time.

For instance, if you have a script which is dumping the environment variables passed as arguments to an output file (DumpEnvVars.exe), the following trigger creation:

cm trigger create before-editreview before-editreview-trigger "C:\wkspaces\scripts\DumpEnvVars.exe -env=PLASTIC_REVIEW_ACTION;PLASTIC_REVIEW_ACTION_INFO C:\wkspaces\outputs\before-editreview-trigger-result.txt" --server=localhost:8084

And you do a code review edit like this one:

cm codereview -e 19 --status="Under review" --assignee="Michaella"

The script would write a file with the following content:

PLASTIC_REVIEW_ACTION = edit status;edit assignee
PLASTIC_REVIEW_ACTION_INFO = Rework required->Under review;Thormund->Michaella