Good day everyone,
I am happy to announce the release of the ThingWorx GitBackup Extension version 5.1.0.
Please (as always) read the disclaimer: this Extension is provided as-is and without warranty or support. It is not part of the PTC product suite. This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license. Do not open PTC Technical Support tickets, instead read the instructions here.
This release is available for download here.
Changelog:
Fixed bugs:
- fixed inability to export ModelTags
- fixed multiple issues that resulted in the inability to remove the Git pack objects in the FileRepository
Various improvements
- added a basic set of integration tests in the GitBackup.Tests.Thing. These significantly help the speed of bug fixing and quality of software.
- switched to use the source-code for the latest version 6.10.1.202505221210-r of JGIT compatible with Java 11, instead of the JAR library; this was done because multiple issues required fixes to be done in JGIT’s source code. As such, the source code contains a far higher number of source files as before.
- significant optimization of source code, that should result in a smaller amount of time that will be spent on I/O operations. The main Git object is now stored in memory, for faster access, as opposite to being discarded after each operation.
- adds ANT build script tasks for automatic version increment and upload to a ThingWorx server
Comments:
- This release, while being minor in terms of features, it required much more time investment than other releases. This is because the second bug itself was extremely devious to fix, and at the end of the day it required modifying the JGit library source code.
- This is also the first release where I introduced integration testing. This was not just a simple quality of life or "highly desired" improvement, instead it was simply required to fix the issue above. Without it, the time to fix would have been at least double.
- When using this extension in PTC Cloud, you will encounter situations when executing a simple Push or Pull will take much more time than it would take if being hosted in a VM. The reason for this is a limitation of Azure Files (they have increased latency on frequent metadata operations that JGit performs). There are two good news here: Azure started to fix this with a feature called "metadata caching" which officially is in preview, but they expect that this will be released to GA soon (unclear when that will be). The second topic is that the services will run just fine - it's just Composer that will not give an indication that the service finished execution. Wrapping those services in a custom service with logger.warns at the end will prove just this. Nothing to do here, just be aware about this.
