Alcides Fonseca

40.197958, -8.408312

Plastic SCM

Today I came across Plastic SCM which I believe it might be Distributed VCS solution for the Enterprise.

Although it’s written in C#, it runs in Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris (thanks to the mono project) but lacks the server version and GUI tools in the last two.

Of course it doesn’t provide as many command-line utilities like git, but there are plenty of them and one thing that makes me like it: A task-driven workflow. I know that git is just small tools to make your own workflow, but I kinda like this default one.

For project management, you can track the different branches quite easily and even get a 3D visualization of the versions

For enterprise (specially if you are a Microsoft-based house), Plastic has really cool integrations. Visual Studio, Eclipse, JDeveloper, CruiseControl(.NET), VersionOne, Trac, Bugzilla, you name it. And you can import your CVS, SVN and SourceSafe, so no one can call you oldfashioned any more.

But what is really cool about Plastic, is the code merging tools. Besides the 3way code merging, it gives you merging of Binary files, like images, folders, Word files and other binaries. This is the future I want!

Oh and it’s free for Education and OpenSource Projects!