Release Notes

Windows - Plastic: The new Code Review system now allows to start conversations, using the "Reply" functionality.

Remember, right now, you need to start with plastic --codereview to enjoy the new feature.

You can check how it looks here, dealing with a conversation with several threads.

macOS - Plastic: Improved the progress text shown in the workspace window toolbar to correctly use the available space and adapt it when the window is resized. We saw that sometimes the progress text was cropped even when there was plenty of space available to display it.

Here goes the "before and after":

All platforms - Server: New Merge Rules system.

We added a Merge Rules system (mergerules.conf). Use it to make branch reviews mandatory prior to merge.

This is a good equivalent to the popular "pull request restrictions" that force to review branches before merge.

The Merge Rules define what branches must be reviewed when merged to certain branches.

If a merge can't happen, you'll receive an error like this:

Cannot perform the merge. Review the branch '/main/QUAK-00' to merge it to '/main'.

Here is an example of a very simple mergerules.conf forcing all branches QUAK-* to be reviewed prior to be merged to main.

>cat mergerules.conf
 [{
     "enabled": true,
     "repositories": "*",

     "rule": "only_allow_merges_if_reviewed",
     "to":
     {
         "branchNames": ["main"]
     },
     "from":
     {
         "branchNames": ["QUAK-*"],
     }
 }]

The new mergerules.conf is a JSON file that must be placed in the server directory (where plasticd.exe is located).

You will find a mergerules.conf file with some examples in your server directory, inside config_samples, and alongside the binaries for clean setups (on Windows using the installer, and GNU/Linux using the official packages) so you can directly modify it. You don't need to restart the server for changes to take effect!

Each rule defines source and destination branch matching as well. Branch matching is done using name patterns (with '*' to represent any substring), attribute matching, and you can specify multiple rules of each kind, too.

Finally, when you're about to merge a branch, the server will check whether there are any rules that apply to that source/destination pair.

We plan to support different kinds of mergerules in the future, but right now there is only one: 'only_allow_merges_if_reviewed'. If both source and destination branches match a rule of this kind, the server will only to merge source branches that have an Approved review.

It is also possible to filter branches by attributes, instead of names. Check the example mergerules.conf to find all the filtering options.

Server, DevOps: Added notifications of "code review changed" events through the web socket channel the DevOps mergebots use. This means the mergebots will now be able to implement filters to avoid merging branches that don't have an approved code review.

We will enable this filter for our built-in "trunk-bot" really soon. Stay tuned!

To enable this notification on custom mergebots you may have written, your mergebot will have to subscribe to these events by sending a message to the Plastic Server websocket endpoint (e.g. ws://<SERVER_IP_HOSTNAME>:7111/plug).

The subscription message looks like the following json:

 
{
  "action": "register",
  "type": "trigger",
  "eventlist": [
    "codeReviewChanged"
  ]
}

(The "eventlist" array could also contain "newChangesets" and "branchAttributeChanged" trigger types to subscribe to these events too).

Once the subscription is completed, your mergebot will be able to receive "code review changed" messages when a code review is created, when the code review status is changes, when the code review title is changed, and when a code review is deleted.

The message sent this way through the web socket looks like the following json:

{
  "type": "trigger",
  "event": "codeReviewChanged",
  "properties": {
    "branchComment": "HDP-122 - implement stats tool",
    "branchFullName": "/main/HDP-122",
    "branchId": "682",
    "branchOwner": "JesusManuel",
    "codeReviewId": "684",
    "codeReviewStatus": "Approved",
    "codeReviewTitle": "Review HDP-122",
    "repository": "tooling"
  }
}

REMARK: The code review notifications are sent only if the code review is bound to a branch.

All platforms - Command line client: we have added an "--ignored" option to the "cm rm private" command.

By default, ignored files are skipped during the delete. The "--ignored" option allows you to include ignored files.

Note: this is a change from the previous default behaviour. Previously, ignored files were included by default.