how to subversion AutoCAD

Question

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 ?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.