PlasticSCM hijacking and hiding errors

After a fresh from-scratch Unity Hub and Unity 2021.2.7f1 install we've discovered "PlasticSCM" also came with it (apparently?). Have never heard of this component and did not opt-in for it.

It is hijacking and silently eating unhandled errors intended for the console. This wasted a significant amount of time and development energy.

Specifically, in PlasticApp.cs "HandleUnhandledException" is consuming exceptions, deciding that "IsPlasticStackTrace" is false, so it just exits quietly, causing exception logging that previously defaulted to the console to disappear. This is some nasty misbehavior.

Why is this being done, and why is it the default for a fresh Unity install? A new or non-technical user is not going to be able to figure this out.

 

We had removed the Collaborate component, but it seemed to leave behind DLLs in the /Library/ folder that continued to cause issues. It was resolved after removing it, re-building the visual studio solution, and also re-building the /Library/ folder.

I've not had time to try re-creating this particular issue in a vacuum; I assume there was some conflict between our project's existing exception handling and PlasticSCM. The frustration came from a new, non-critical beta package installing itself unannounced in our project. Something like this should probably not be defaulted on, and users instead given the choice to opt-in if we're interested.

 

Hi @ryanc-unity, apologies for digging this up a month later but I just ran into what I believe is the exactly same thing happening, where while following a debug I noticed that PlasticsApp.cs was being jumped to suddenly, and as Spellbook so aptly put it, eating errors and then having the code continue on. In my case it was around a foreach loop:

foreach (X x in xs)
{
x.changed = false;
}

xs while it had been created had nothing in it yet. Upon correcting the error in my code and walking through it again the PlasticsApp.cs was no longer involved.

I'm not the most technical person out there - so just passing on the experience. Given where a console error message was being thrown had me looking in all the wrong places for the issue.

 

Looks like we are not the first bit by this and given the lack of acknowledgement we wont be the last. not silently ignoring exceptions is some 101 level programming stuff. you should use throw syntax keyword to re throw an exception you dont intend to handle.