Managing the Branches

[Guest]

Besides managing changes through a 3rd Party tracker, like Bugzilla, Is there any way to make managing the Branches easier? Besides trying to merge each available branch, I did not see any way to easily determine if there were any pending changes to be merged from a branch. While this is currently not a major problem, as our list of Branches grows, knowing which Branches are

[Borja]

Well, branch management can be done just clicking on Plastic SCM, although we're open to suggestions... You can try a merge from the branch, and it will detect whether there are pending merges or not. Anyway, the next release will include creating queries (the plastic "find" command) to ask for merges.

In the "Enterprise" edition you can remove the "view" permission from a branch so you don't see it anymore. Do you find it enough or would you like to have some sort of "active / inactive" status? Looks like a simple requirement.

Please, let me know if you have any other questions. We can also give you support setting up Plastic, deciding the branching pattern, and so on...

[Guest]

With only a few branches to maintain at this point, trying to merge branches in order to determine if there are pending merges is already cumbersome. While some of these problems go away as we get more comfortable working with parallel development, branches, and your product, the number of branches to manage will increase greatly over time. Being able to remove them from views is a big advantage for the enterprise edition and providing branch status flag for the standard edition would certainly help manage the branches.

Can we mix standard and enterprise licenses, i.e. install enterprise edition on our server to store the repositories and manage the branches and permissions, while installing standard editions on the individual developers computers?

[Borja]

Well, normally our customers (and also ourselves internally) use some sort of task or issue tracking software (Bugzilla, Mantis, OnTime, defect control or even Jira). So the regular working model is:

- You have an initial baseline

- You create tasks and branches (one branch for each task, check http://www.plasticscm.com/whitepapers/bestpractices.pdf and also http://www.plasticscm.com/whitepapers/paralleldevelopment.pdf)

- Developers work on their branches

- Once they are done, tasks are marked as finished or closed (depending on the issue tracking software)

- You *just* integrate the tasks which are closed... so you don't even have to "try to merge" your branches.

- Alternatively you can also check the "branch explorer" diagram to check what's going on.

Mixing standard and pro licenses is not possible (in fact one of the key differences between both releases is actually security).

[cyberflex]

Do you find it enough or would you like to have some sort of "active / inactive" status? Looks like a simple requirement.

This would be a great feature! I had a similar question to support and the only response I could get was to use the "search" function. While this may be ok for developers when working on an individual task, it is not the same for integrators working on many branches. I vote for the "active/inactive" flag for a branch which can be turned on or off in the branch viewer and/or explorer.