subversion as repository for solidworks projects

Hello,

Recently there was a discussion on this group about cvs and subversion
as a methode to store version and ropository. Fot software projects I
use CVS and saw this was not suitable for solidworks files because
solidworks are stored as binary files. With the succesor of CVS
Subversion (http://subverion.tigris.org) this problem solved. So now I
was thinking is subversion couldn't be used as the backend for a
solidworks version control system.

This version control system for solidworks should at least be able to do:
- keep subsequent changes and version of files
- has a commit, update, status, and checkout (as subversion can do)
- check on dependency (is that neccesary while you can go back to a
certain state, date or release)
- some interface within solidworks to do revisions and put the
information in the information in the costum properties.
- be able to get back a released version of files, project or other.

The aim would be a very basic version control system for solidworks.

Has someone already done some filecontrol with subversion and could this
be a backend for a system described?

Thanks in advance.


Johnny

 

I think it can be done. I don't know subversion yet (but CVS). I'm not sure
about the real advantages over existing PDM solutions. IMHO archiving
binaries (even diffs) isn't efficient.
I'm thinking / preparing an XML-based PDM/PLM tool which would archive only
structure of models (full rebuilds necessary when reverting to a previous
state). See www.cadml.org
I'd appreciate to share ideas on all this.

 

Don't you need a version control system for the xml file created?

Johnny

 

VCS for XML is something special because of the structure of XML documents.
There are better approaches than (code) text diffs. Check google for "diff
xml".
If I was building a new PDM tool now, I would consider subversion+XML as a
good candidate technology.

 

IBM has an oper source project known as Stellation which is also very
powerful. For structured data such as source code and XML there are a
lot of interesting possibilities. The versioning is much more fine
grained than CVS (I don't know about Subversion).

http://eclipse.org/stellation

Jim S.

 

Since SW is bloating our files with Parasolid Data. Couldn't an older
version just convert that data, and if you had Office you could run feature
works on it. Atleast you would have a solid. Just thinking out loud.

Corey