Team 254 Open-Source Release: Cheesy Parts

[Andrew Schreiber]

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.

There is a tool called git-annex that is meant to work with large binary files. I haven't personally set up a repository but I have had the experience of using it for a project at work. We were using it to track multiple terabytes of video data and it worked well.