[brennonbrimhall]

Originally Posted by Jon Jack

If you were interested in just checking in and out files, then yes you could use Git. However, Git is intended to be used with text files, not binary files like the ones created by SolidWorks.

In SolidWorks different files are associated with each other. For example, an Assembly will have many parts associated with it. Git has no way of recognizing these types of relationships. So if I'm using Git and I wanted to check out an assembly and all the parts associated with it, then I'd have to manually check out each part. If I wanted to do this in PDM then all I'd have to do is check out the assembly and check a box that checks out all associated files.

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

Plus Git's distributed nature makes it particularly ill-suited to storing CAD files (compared to SVN, for example). When you clone a Git repo, you're not only copying all the binary part/assembly files it contains, you're also downloading all their previous revisions in their entirety, since binary files don't diff well. This is probably measured in the tens of GB by the time a robot design nears completion.

Gotcha -- thanks for the feedback and explanation.