On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 3:47 AM Justin MASSIOT | Zentek <justin.mass...@zentek.fr> wrote: > > Luke, > > If the 3D models are "source" files, then I personally approve to put those > files into a Subversion repo. That's what I do everyday with Electronic > engineering CAD files. > By the way, don't forget you may not be able to "diff" between two versions > of a file. If not, you lose one the main strength of a Version control > system: doing even a small rollback may become a pain... Plus if you can't > diff, you probably can't merge either! I encourage you to use locks to avoid > any form of conflicts. The "needs-lock" property can be useful. > > As for the project status, I don't know anything but I would be curious to > get the developers' point of view.
This sounds similar to our use case at $dayjob, where we have been using SVN since 2007 to house various types of assets, not just source code. Yes, you can't diff and merge binary assets, but that would be true whether you use a version control system or not. But you do benefit from having older versions in case you need more than the "undo" of whatever application creates those files, and you have a log of who committed each file and when. If you can get your users to write *helpful* log messages, that's even better. Before we adopted SVN, we actually first looked at Git because it seemed very popular even in those early days, but ultimately we decided on SVN because it is much more suitable for us, partly because non-software-developer users are able to understand it and partly because it's better at housing non-source-code assets, like CAD, EDA, artwork, documents, etc. Distributed systems like Git rely upon being able to fork and merge, which you can't do with non- source-code assets. Regarding the project's viability going forward, my point of view is that like all open source projects, it ultimately depends upon whether those who benefit from it are willing to give back in some way; not necessarily financially, but rather in terms of helping in any way that one is willing and able to, whether it's documentation, fixing bugs, developing features, testing, or whatever. I'm here because Subversion is important to me both professionally and personally. Also, you do have access to the full source code, so your data isn't being held in someone's undocumented silo. This was the biggest reason why at my $dayjob the first requirement any version control system had to meet before we would adopt it was to be open source. That's my 2 cents... Hope that helps! Nathan
