Gluon and Plastic Workspaces Formats

[ThatGuy]

I was hoping to run plastic and gluon in a mixed environment.  Where users would use gluon for day to day needs and then use plastic when extra functionality was needed.  But the two applications use different workspace formats.  This makes it less seamless to switch between one and the other.  Is using a common workspace format something that is in the roadmap?

[manu]

Hello,

no, it's not in our roadmap. Gluon uses an special workspace because the special feature it has, unfortunately it's not compatible with the regular GUI.

 

[NC3D]

Can you please point me to a doc that outlines the differences between Gluon and Plastic?

-Donald

[manu]

Hello @NC3D,

I'm afraid we don't have that specific document but by reading the official Gluon site you can understand for what it was made: https://www.plasticscm.com/gluon.html

Let me summarize the main differences:

Workspace configuration:

• Gluon allows you to select what do you want to download from the repo.
• Plastic SCM forces you to download everything (not 100% true since cloaked.conf allows you to tweak it - https://www.plasticscm.com/documentation/gui/plastic-scm-version-control-gui-guide.shtml?term=cloaked.conf)

Update operation:

• Gluon allows you to have the workspace partially updated, some files might load the head revision, some other might now. The update operation can happen for a single file.
• The update operation for the Plastic SCM GUI will target an entire changeset specification, it's not allowed to have a mixed configuration.

Merge:

• Gluon support a very basic file merge operation.
• Plastic SCM is able to handle really advance merge cases: https://www.plasticscm.com/mergemachine/index.html

Branching:

• Gluon support the "Switch to branch" operation.
• Plastic SCM supports Switching and creating new branches.

At the end of the day Gluon has been designed for an Artist point of view workflow meanwhile Plastic SCM is used by developers and it covers much more complex scenarios.

If you need more details just let me know it.