Import/Export options for PlasticSCM

[mmyers]

I'm currently evaluating Plastic for use at a small research team at an educational institution, that's expecting to get larger as time goes on.

So far, I think Plastic is a beautiful system, and I'm seriously considering using the Community Edition for my own personal projects.

However, there is one thing that I can't find much information on that might be a deal-breaker, for using it at my work: We want to have an 'escape hatch' for any system we use, especially if it a proprietary system. We don't want to get locked in, once we get a significant amount of code into the system. Our team's needs may change drastically as we grow, so being able to migrate to a different source control system is a critical point of flexibility that we'd like to have, even if we don't necessarily exercise it.

Ideally, we'd like to see a way to export to Git or Mercurial. I couldn't find any information about current tools to do this, but I think I saw that there may be a way in the 4.0 version. Is this a definite feature, that we can count on Plastic having in the near future? If so, is 4.0 close to being released, or are we still several months away for that?

Thanks.

[psantosl]

Hi!

> I'm currently evaluating Plastic for

> use at a small research team at an

> educational institution, that's expecting

> to get larger as time goes on.

Excellent! Community Edition (CE) must be a perfect fit for you!

> So far, I think Plastic is a beautiful system,

> and I'm seriously considering using the Community

> Edition for my own personal projects.

Hey! Beautiful, powerful, distributed...

> However, there is one thing that I can't

> find much information on that might be a

> deal-breaker, for using it at my work:

> We want to have an 'escape hatch' for

> any system we use, especially if it a

> proprietary system. We don't want to get

> locked in, once we get a significant amount

> of code into the system. Our team's needs

> may change drastically as we grow, so being

> able to migrate to a different source control

> system is a critical point of flexibility

> that we'd like to have, even if we don't

> necessarily exercise it.

Yep! I do understand.

Well, there're two options here:

1) Plastic stores *everything* on a relational database, an open one, not a "cleverly designed" file based backend like almost every other SCM out there uses. So, if things go really wrong, you can always write a small app to migrate away, your data is there, and the structure is not complicated.

2) We *already* have a fast-export command for 3.0, still not released but will be out pretty soon (a matter of weeks). We already used to migrate our own repos from 3.0 to 4.0.

> Ideally, we'd like to see a way to

> export to Git or Mercurial. I couldn't

> find any information about current tools

> to do this, but I think I saw that there

> may be a way in the 4.0 version.

> Is this a definite feature, that we can

> count on Plastic having in the near future?

The goal for Plastic 4 is to be truly interoperable, so we'll start with better import/export but the goal is to really come up with something which will integrate with Git, SVN and most likely TFS too.

> If so, is 4.0 close to being released, or are we still several

> months away for that?

4.0 is really advanced already, check the screenshots here:

http://www.facebook.com/PlasticSCM

and here:

but since 3.0 is rock solid we're taking our time to release 4.0, specially since we're packaging a huge amount of new stuff on it, including beating all SCMs out there in performance, including git:

http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2011/04/unscientific-40-benchmark-test.html

Please let me know if you need more info!

Regards,

pablo