Hi, I am new to Subversion. I was trying to subversion AutoCAD files for my projects deparment, however it does'nt seem to work. It works fine with docs and xls files etc.,
Along with 'subversion', i am using Tortoise SVN client.
Would appreciate some clear responses for this ?
Sams ps - Any suggestions for AutoDesk Vault workgroup ?
You can check-in the AutoCAD files into your Subversion system just like how you check-in other files, and you can rollback the files just like how you roll back other files.
But you can't do a diff or merge operation, for autocad files are binary files.
Subversion handles any type of files. However, you need to be aware that you can't diff binary files (including Excel and Word, though I've seen some scripts that can help showing differences between Excel sheets to some extend).
It is possible, though, that subversion doesn't recognize your AutoCAD files as binary files and treats them as text. In this case it might corrupt the files due to line ending mangling. If this happens, set the svn:mime-type property to application/octet-stream (or something else that differs from text/plain -- subversion treats everything else as binary) to get those files treated as binary too. You can use auto-props to automate this.
You could, possibly, merge & diff DXF files since they are text files but definitely not the DWG format - it is an encrypted binary. If you're looking simply for a time-capsule type of storage then @bluebrother's answer is correct.
If you want diff reports then you will have to write a custom app or use a DWG comparison program. There are a few out there like DWG compare, http://www.wirecad.com/50/diff.htm. Google and browse. If you know much about AutoCAD's object model then you will know how complex such an app will be. Shopping is a much easier option.
If you're thinking 3-way merge then I'm thinking forget it. Locking a file on checkout to 1 Cadder will make your life a lot less difficult.
It should be possible to check in AutoCAD DVB files into Subversion. I have done this several times.
Unfortunately it is not possible to merge/diff those files with Subversion (or any other tool I know). So I wrote myself a plugin for the VBA IDE. This plugin can export all projects currently in the VBA IDE to a given directory as plain source files. I also store the original DVB files because this export will not work for the forms.
Doing so I can diff the individual source files, merge them and copy them back to the DVB file. Time consuming, but working.