Simple Gluon branch switching
We have an art team who are using Gluon. There are occasions when an artist will need to work in collaboration on features. Or other occasions where we might need to stage changes in another branch.
We would like Gluon to be able to change to a known branch. A simple branch name text box (with auto-complete and drop down history) would be idea and avoid the complications of the full PlasticSCM UI.
RichT
shared this idea
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David O'Donoghue
commented
No problem only allowing switching when they have no changes, it's pretty much the same thing as switching a workspace.
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David O'Donoghue
commented
Some of my artists are also gameplay designers. I need them to be able to switch to branches where our game design is being overhauled and tweak values etc.
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Eric Mehl
commented
We would find this really useful as well! We'd be fine with the restrictions mentioned. Our use case is having artists on Gluon and not having to worry about merging, and a project lead managing branching and merging. A lot of the time our branches are created for something like "I want to try some things without polluting the main branch, then decide if any of those changes should be merged in to the main branch".
So the files used in a branch are usually not that different from the parent branch. So I'd say just keeping the current configuration and assuming any new files that appear on the branch switch should be unloaded would be fine. Then it's just a simple update operation to update the downloaded files to the latest on that branch, right?
Just some thoughts based on how we work.
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Hi RichT,
Thanks for the suggestion.
Gluon was definitely not designed to handle branches, since it is certainly not meant to merge.
That being said, we could add something in the lines of branch switching.
Things to consider:
* The easiest would be to disallow it if user has pending changes of any kind. Ask them to undo or checkin first.
* Then unconfigure the workspace and let the user reconfigure later.
* But this means unloading all content and asking the user to reconfigure and redownload. In huge repos with gigabytes of downloaded contents like the ones you guys use in game dev, it could end up being painful. So, we should probably think about something capable of keeping the configuration and reusing as much content as possible... something to think about.We will double check this and also wait to see if other users vote for it.