Re: Using Subversion as Source Code and Mechanical CAD "Vault"

On Sat, 2004-10-02 at 18:57, Nir Mor wrote:
> Does anyone tried to use Subversion as Mechanical CAD "Vault" (
> Solidworks ,SolidEdge, ProE …) ?
>
> It will be beneficial to make branches and tags of Source Code and
> Mechanical CAD combined.

I'm a TA for McMaster's first year engineering graphics course and we
use solidedge for design in the labs and have a drafting portion as
well.

If I remember correctly the program saves drawings as binary files.
Therefore the diff's of the files may not be very useful, but the
comments and the ability to rollback maybe very useful for you company.

I doubt you would be able to merge two binary files together, no matter
the file type in subversion.

Even CAD files which I believe are ASCII would not be simple to merge
cleanly as there could be many differences in the vectors and
representations of shapes.
Due to the nature of the CAD storage schema it would likely be very
difficult to decide which file is correct when two files differ in the
merge and I'm sure it would be easy to corrupt files.

So to summarize:
1) Central repository with a chance to rollback and comments on changes
and "accounting" of the files is likely good for your firm.

2) Merging and branching may be out of scope for both binary and CAD
files, but some SVN gurus may have more to say about that.

Chris

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