switch to changeset

[hampsterx]

hi there, no idea if this has been asked or what but..

We sometimes have the need to switch to a specific changeset on a branch, not the most recent (head) changeset. Is there a good reason this feature isn't available?

PS Madly in love with Plastic V4, keep up the good work

Cheers, TiM

[carpediemevive]

I think that depends on why you're switching to that particular changeset. I can think of two reasons:

1) You are tracking down a change and want to take a look and see if a certain change was made at a particular changeset. I would do this a couple of different ways. First I would consider annotating the file (Plastic GUI -> Items window -> Right Click -> Annotate) and that can show you what changeset, branch, and who committed the change that you are looking at.

Alternatively I would go into the branch explorer or changesets view and browse the repository on that changeset, and optionally Diff the files in that changeset.

2) You are needed to fix a bug that came from a changeset and opt to do it there and then merge it back in. Then I would branch from the changeset in question and create a new branch for the change. Then I would do my work on this new branch and merge that branch into whatever other branches needed it.

Would any of these take care of what you need to accomplish? Or perhaps you could elaborate on what you are doing in the changeset so I could better understand what you are saying?

[manu]

I would add one more option in order to avoid switching to a certain changeset:

3) Right click on the desired changeset and click on "Browse repository on this changeset". You will able to explore the repository status in this changeset and open files and directories as if you have them on disk.

That said, if you really want/need to change your workspace to a certain changeset you can do it like this: http://screencast.com/t/auCrlrlFKylQ

Or more hacker: cm update . --changeset=XXX

[cidico]

Hi everyone,

Just to give my 2 cents here...

Sometimes when I was starting in Plastic I missed the possibility of using this feature. But after reading the docs about branch-per-task methodology I realized that this was my task's branches were "too big" (taking too much to change the other branch task).

I'm fighting this at work with one colleague that uses the "svn mode" in Plastic... He's not used to small branches at his daily tasks.

One thing I can say to you is: "Switching to a changeset" a path to the dark side it is. Train yourself to let go... :)

[hampsterx]

We branch everything. One use case we have is simply wanting to check how it looked prior, this is particularly the case with web development where you do a lot of fiddly CSS work, and it would be nice to be able to compare the progression over the course of the branch where you might be tweaking little by little. Secondly sometimes you want to see how it functioned in case you broke something, maybe it was working at the start of the branch but somehow it got busted along the way, say on tuesday, now its friday, oops.

Surprised (and delighted) to hear its in the command line tool, that is good enough for me, keeping it out of the UI is probably a wise decision

[psantosl]

It is already implemented, but not yet published. It will be out next week (sitting to be published for more than 2 weeks already, we found a small regression and didn't put "switch to changeset" on the build).