Release Notes

This is the fourth release of the new Plastic SCM 6.0 series. It includes important core improvements and features. It is published in the "labs" channel instead of the official one because there are some important design changes still to be delivered, although it is stable enough to be used in production.

Mac OS GUI and Mergetool: Plastic SCM for Mac OS now have embedded Semantic Diffs included!

Mac OS GUI: Differences are now editable in the 'Pending changes' and 'Diff branch/changeset' views. Differences between left/right contributor can be deleted/restored by using the two button bars attached to each difference.

(Editions can be saved when the right revision is the same as the loaded one in the workspace).

Windows GUI, Linux (GTK) GUI, and Mac OS GUI: Multiple improvements in the 'Branch Explorer' view:

* Now, the first result for a search in the Branch Explorer is guaranteed to be the exact one (if it exists).

* Additionally: the Branch Explorer multi-selection was improved back on release 5.4.16.791: when you searched for an object on the Branch Explorer, it did not affect your selection, but the properties panel was not being updated with the information from your search results. Now, it shows again the information of the current search result as well, and not only the information of the last selected object, without affecting the selection.

With these two improvements, it is easier to search for changesets, labels, and branches, correctly identifying the one you want, to perform actions like diffing them.

Linux (GTK) GUI and Mac OS GUI: Differences for big files are now calculated on demand. A new panel with a button to start calculating differences is shown when a big file is focused.

The default threshold to consider a big file is set to 2MB, but this threshold can be overriden by setting the following entry in the mergetool.conf config file:

big_file_size=NumberOfBytes

Example (set threshold to 3MB):

big_file_size=3145728

REMARK: The diff control will still show regular embedded differences for non-big files.

Linux (GTK) GUI and Mac OS GUI: Two new context menu options have been added to the 'Pending Changes' view menu:

* Apply local change: converts any local change to a controlled change. For instance, a locally changed file will become a checked-out file and private file will become an added file.

* Search matches: applies locally moved files from a private/local delete pair when Plastic can't automatically detect them as such.

Mac OS GUI: Added Unity Smart Merge as a mergetool to the pre-configured tools. To configure it in Plastic SCM:

1 - Go to the "Merge tools" tab of the preferences window.

2 - Click on the "Add" button

3 - For the file type, select "Custom extension" and type ".unity".

4 - From the "External tool" dropdown list, select UnitySmartMerge.

5 - Click "Save".

Repeat steps 2 to 5, changing the ".unity" extension for ".prefab", to finish configuring Unity Smart Merge in Plastic SCM.

By default, if Unity Smart Merge finds any conflict that cannot be automatically solved, it will prompt you to manually solve it using macOS' FileMerge utility. You can configure Unity Smart Merge to use the mergetool shipped alongside Plastic SCM (a.k.a. macmergetool), instead of FileMerge. To do so:

Edit the file /Applications/Unity/Unity.app/Contents/Tools/mergespecfile.txt, adding these two lines to tell Unity Smart Merge to use macmergetool:

unity use "/usr/local/bin/macmergetool" "-s=%r" "-d=%l" "-b=%b" "-o=%d"
prefab use "/usr/local/bin/macmergetool" "-s=%r" "-d=%l" "-b=%b" "-o=%d"

You can learn more about Unity Smart Merge here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SmartMerge.html