Labview Revision Control

[Joe Ross]

Our team has decided to look very seriously at using labview next year. One thing that worries me is revision control. We started using CVS a few years ago to make it much easier for multiple people to work on the code. My favorite feature was the merge capability so that multiple people can work on the same file (and even the same line of code), since in the fast paced world of FIRST we don't always have our files as self contained as I would like.

I found the following document about revision control in labview: http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/4633

We did use labview for the dashboard, and I stored the VIs in CVS, which worked ok. However, we only had one person working on it, so we only needed to store the revisions, no need for merging. Now that we will have everyone, merging would be nice, but the above document says that it is not supported. It does show graphical differencing, which would work better then nothing.

The only problem is that the document implies that you have to have a supported version control solution to take advantage of the graphical differencing. Most of the supported software costs thousands of dollars. The supported CVS client costs $27 per license, which adds up. Are there any cheaper ways to get graphical differencing?