Most FrustratingThing About Plastic SCM?

[sbaum]

I'm currently evaluating Plastic SCM for my company.  So far I really like it.  The visual aspect is fantastic and branching/merging is really easy.  However, I know that no product is perfect.  For those of you that use Plastic SCM in a business environment, what has been the most frustrating thing that you have had to deal with while using Plastic?

 

A couple other questions I have:

1. Are there common issues that you have to deal with?  
2. For those that have upgraded, does that process generally go smoothly?
3. How is support?
4. If you are using SQL Server as your backend, have you tried restoring and if so, how well did the process work?
5. How big is your development staff that is using Plastic?
6. Any other opinions you have about Plastic.

 

Thanks!

[SilverKnight]

For those of you that use Plastic SCM in a business environment, what has been the most frustrating thing that you have

had to deal with while using Plastic?

It doesn't really have to do with the product per-say, but rather compatibility.

I would have to say client/server upgrade scenario where BOTH have to be updated at the same time. There is something to be said for maintaining backward compatibility. I know it isn't always possible, and there are reasons for upgrading that require changes on both ends. That doesn't make me like it though, and the more people that it has to be pushed out to, the harder it is.

Recently, I updated my client+server at home, and could no longer access my server at work due to this problem. I had to "manually" (re)install the older client in a new folder and fiddle with configuration files until I could retrieve a project from my work server. In hindsight, I would have waited to do the upgrade at home until *after* the upgrade happened at work.

 

Are there common issues that you have to deal with?

I think this is going to depend on the features you use. A co-worker tried using the explorer plug-in, and had many issues that I never experienced, but he seemed to get them quite often. I recommended just not using that plug-in.

Same thing with the VS plug-in - it often showed things as changed, while the GUI showed no changes. We have since stopped using those plug-ins and have had no issues with the product.

 

For those that have upgraded, does that process generally go smoothly?

The upgrades I've done (some major, some minor) have all worked flawlessly - see "exception" above.

 

How is support?

Awesome. The community is very helpful, and the staff knowledgeable - even for supporting the free "community edition". I've not found a company that does better.

 

If you are using SQL Server as your backend, have you tried restoring and if so, how well did the process work?

I'm not really sure how this is relevant to the product, since you will be using a different companies (e.g. MS) tools to do the backup and restore - just make sure Plastic server is OFF. (I have it running on SQL 2012/Win2012 at work on the same machine, and at home, I'm using SQL2005 on 2k3 with Plastic on 2k8)  - I've not had any need to migrate yet, but I may update my home machines to 2012 soon.  (I didn't have a problem upgrading either one from 4.1 to 5.0, though others had reported problems when SQL wasn't on the same machine)

Our company doesn't actually do backups like that - instead, we have it installed on a VM server, and backup the entire server image, then incremental backup changes - which has worked very well for our environment because it captures the entire state of the machine, not just a single application. YMMV.

 

How big is your development staff that is using Plastic?

We only have 5-7 people using it right now.

 

Any other opinions you have about Plastic.

I've tried a number of SCM systems, and Plastic was my choice hands down for the company (and I fought for it) - when others wanted to use TFS. I can say that I much prefer Plastic over every other system I've tried (TFS, SVN, CVS/WinCVS, SourceSafe, Git, Mercurial) and I would change only with a lot of kicking and screaming.

 

We had a large repository of projects in CVS->WinCVS, and I was able to import those directly into plastic with the tools provided, but the export process was a bit more involved (the scripts only supported CVS and NOT WinCVS, so all of my text files ended up in unix format - I had to use another tool to correct that problem. It isn't what I would call an easy problem to solve, but it was a "free" one - converting from CVS to TFS would have required purchasing a tool to do it, and cost the company a lot of money.

You can find some support questions on this process from what I've posted, so you can see the support I was given, even though I'm using the community edition - in my opinion, outstanding support compared to some of the PAID support I've gotten elsewhere.

 

The recent update on 5 significantly improved the Jira integration as well - and was the main driver behind the recent upgrade I went through.

[JakubH]

We are using Plastic in our company for a year and a half or so. We have run into a lot of small troubles since then, a lot of small user experience issues, but I thing there has been no really big frustration.

There are also some common issues but we can live with them. I've tried to post our problems here on the forum (many smaller issues are in this thread) or to uservoice, so you can find most of them here. (I have a list of other issues, which I hasn't had time to formulate and post to the forum yet.) However, I need to admit, that we are quite demanding. The good thing is that the authors of Plastic have implemented several of our ideas already.

 

To summarize it: I think the Plastic team should pay more attention to details and user workflow and hire a good User Experience researcher (or a UX team). That is a weak part for me sometimes, even though they claim to be very GUI oriented.

Some features seems to be more like a beta version only (Code Review support, WebUI,...).

 

The upgrade process from one version to another is usually very smooth. The only small problem is (as SilverKnight already described) upgrading to a new incompatible version, where you need upgrade server and client in sync. However, these incompatible changes are not very often (releases are every two week or so, but the incompatible changes were maybe one or two per year I think).

 

The import of all our codebase from CVS (which we have used before) was quite complicated, but it was more a problem of our repository and CVS than an issue of Plastic. And finally, it was successful.

 

The support here on forum is good, I have no experience with the payed one.

 

We use Postgres as a backend. We just backup dumps from it.

 

Our development team is almost on the edge of a Community License. Currently there is 14 active users in our team, even though not all use it on a daily basis.

 

I still love the idea of a Branch Explorer and the ability to work centralized or distributed way or both.

[sbaum]

Thank you both for your excellent feedback. It sounds like overall you are very happy using Plastic.  Knowing about these issues beforehand, will make things easier, should we choose to go with Plastic.

 

 

 

I think this is going to depend on the features you use. A co-worker tried using the explorer plug-in, and had many issues that I never experienced, but he seemed to get them quite often. I recommended just not using that plug-in.
Same thing with the VS plug-in - it often showed things as changed, while the GUI showed no changes. We have since stopped using those plug-ins and have had no issues with the product.

 

So you primarily work with the Plastic SCM standalone client tool?  During my evaluation I have been using the VS plug-in and it appears to work pretty well, although I have noticed little quirks. I generally used the VS plug-in just for check-ins.  I will say I've done most of my branching/merging in the standalone client tool.

 

 

 

I'm not really sure how this is relevant to the product, since you will be using a different companies (e.g. MS) tools to do the backup and restore - just make sure Plastic server is OFF. (I have it running on SQL 2012/Win2012 at work on the same machine, and at home, I'm using SQL2005 on 2k3 with Plastic on 2k8)  - I've not had any need to migrate yet, but I may update my home machines to 2012 soon.  (I didn't have a problem upgrading either one from 4.1 to 5.0, though others had reported problems when SQL wasn't on the same machine)

Our company doesn't actually do backups like that - instead, we have it installed on a VM server, and backup the entire server image, then incremental backup changes - which has worked very well for our environment because it captures the entire state of the machine, not just a single application. YMMV.

 

The main reason I asked this is because I am also trying out Plastic at home for my development there.  I am running MySql there and I tried a backup/restore there.  The restore worked fine but then the Plastic services wouldn't load up because of some licensing issue.  I posted about it here but haven't received a response, which worries me.  I plan on doing a backup/restore test here at work using SQL Server to make sure everything works.

 

 

 

We only have 5-7 people using it right now.

 

Perfect, our development staff consists of 6 people.

 

 

 

I've tried a number of SCM systems, and Plastic was my choice hands down for the company (and I fought for it) - when others wanted to use TFS. I can say that I much prefer Plastic over every other system I've tried (TFS, SVN, CVS/WinCVS, SourceSafe, Git, Mercurial) and I would change only with a lot of kicking and screaming.

 

I didn't even attempt to install TFS because it looked like overkill for us.  I have tried most of the others you listed, as well as others, and so far the two I've liked the most are Plastic and Perforce.  I have a few more to try out before making a final decision.

 

 

 

We use Postgres as a backend. We just backup dumps from it.

 

Have you attempted to simulate a disaster by trying to recover the database and make sure Plastic worked correctly from the restore?  As you can see above, I tried this with MySql and ran into issues (granted I may have done something wrong during my backup procedure).

 

 

Again, thanks for the thorough comments!

[sbaum]

A couple other questions came to mind:

 

1. How much time is spent on administration of Plastic?  Since we have a small staff this is pretty important for us.  During evaluation, it appears that very little administration is needed.
2. Do you use permissions at all, and if so, have you run into an problems?  I've briefly tinkered with the permissions but for the most part, I'm thinking about not locking it down very much.

[JakubH]

So you primarily work with the Plastic SCM standalone client tool?  During my evaluation I have been using the VS plug-in and it appears to work pretty well, although I have noticed little quirks. I generally used the VS plug-in just for check-ins.  I will say I've done most of my branching/merging in the standalone client tool.

 

We use mainly the standalone client, however we have the Visual Studio plugin active and we use it too. Some things like Annotate or Show history as 2D tree can be shown directly from the context menu of an opened file which is more comfortable than searching for it in the standalone client. I have the Explorer integration installed too as I like to see the overlay icons, though I do not use it otherwise typically. (And even though it is probably not ideal to have .NET assembly loaded in the shell process.)

 

Have you attempted to simulate a disaster by trying to recover the database and make sure Plastic worked correctly from the restore?  As you can see above, I tried this with MySql and ran into issues (granted I may have done something wrong during my backup procedure).

 

Umm. I think we haven't tested it this way. I suppose we'd better try it.

 

1. How much time is spent on administration of Plastic?  Since we have a small staff this is pretty important for us.  During evaluation, it appears that very little administration is needed.
2. Do you use permissions at all, and if so, have you run into an problems?  I've briefly tinkered with the permissions but for the most part, I'm thinking about not locking it down very much.

 

The administration itself is not very demanding. I've spent time on tweaking things though. It really depends on what you want from it. We have several custom triggers attached to Plastic, which check checkin comments, add some attributes for marking opened/closed branches or code review status and so on. We have also a certain level of integration with our custom issue tracking system. Recently, we were upgrading from 4.1.10 to 5.0.44 which are incompatible versions and we also wanted to distribute some configuration among all of us. I also spent a not negligible time on reporting issues to this forum and uservoice.

However, if you are happy with clean Plastic installation, you don't need to spent much time administrating it.

 

We do not use permissions much. Most users are not allowed to delete repository, change permissions or owner etc., but we have no complicated rules.

[cidico]

Hi Sbaum!

 

I'm using Plastic for about 3 years now and I can only say that there's no other tool like Plastic. Really. Plastic + Visual Studio is the perfect development toolkit  since ever!!!

I started using this tool only at home in my pet projects and when I got really "good" at it, I asked my company to migrate from SVN to Plastic and it was caos. Nobody could ever understand the distributed principle that we were basically doing, only with SVN.

 

The first thing that made me love this tool was the support team.

I've got all the support I needed from the development team, even being a free user.

This kind of attention you don't get even from "big players".

 

If you take a look here you will see that the only people more active than me is the Códice Team... I've tried almost every single feature they made available and I never got a "broken build" even with the "labs version". Sure, there were bugs and as soon as I (or other users) told them about the bug the bug got fixed!

 

My two only "problem" with Plastic was the path to migrate from VSS to Plastic and the manual update. I would really love to have plastic always updated automatically

It's not very easy to make your boss understand how great this tool is when you need to use the "competitor" tool to use it.

 

They always listen to all request and implemented some features as I and the community asked them for.

 

In my company we were about 7 devs in the past and they all love plastic now.

But it was a hard fight. They used to love the SVN process. It wasn't nice...

 

If you are a hard user, you can setup plastic to run in your pendrive and take plastic everywhere you go!

 

I've once answered a similar question on stackoverflow site... If you don't mind to take a look, it's here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8860099/using-plastic-scm-for-small-personal-projects/8874563#8874563

 

Best Regards!

[sbaum]

Thanks for the input Plácido!  Fortunately, I'm the one making the decision on which scm tool we use. I've tried many tools over the last month and a half, and today after discussing with some of my developers, I decided to go with Plastic!  It came down essentially to Plastic and Perforce.  The developers (and I) really enjoyed the visual aspect of Plastic and that ended up being one of the major factors of the decision.  Now comes the fun process of moving our projects from our current scm tool into Plastic.  Thankfully, I've done a quite bit of testing with Plastic and importing history of projects, so I think I have the process pretty much down.

 

One of the problems you mentioned was manual update.  Do you mean the incremental updates (that happen every week or so), or do you mean major version upgrades (4 to 5)?  I had imagined that the incremental updates would be pretty easy by just running the new executable.

 

Thanks again!

[cidico]

Congratulations!

 

You won't regret! Plastic is really the best SCM in the market today!

 

I was talking about the incremental updates that Códice releases every week or two. 

The process is easy to do, just run the installer and it's done, but I have to go to the website and download...

I would love to have able to open plastic and it tells me that there's a new version available to install and just press install!

 

I hope you enjoy your new developer lifestyle with Plastic!