kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Clemens, just wanted to give another perspective that goes against your
last line -- Just wanted to say that some of us are very happy to use SCM
daily.

At my workplace, we use Git to store electronics designs and
symbol/footprint libraries.  It started with the electronics people who
also do software (and so already knew how to use Git) and spread to the
rest of the electronics people, who find it easy to use despite not being
familiar with software version control.  It works really well despite not
being integrated into the tools we use.

In my opinion, one important part of the data storage technology is to have
a "diff" viewer for EDA data.  Most of the commercial vendors provide
something, although the quality and ease of use vary.  But, if you can use
a special tool to compare two revisions of a symbol, or footprint, or
schematic, or PCB, then using Git as the underlying revision control
mechanism works really well.

This is why making a diff viewer for KiCad data is on my (long) list of
"things that would take KiCad closer to the high-end commercial tools" that
maybe one day I will have a chance to work on -- I have seen some people
talking about this feature request on forums, but as far as I can tell, no
one has made a proof of concept yet.

(Of course, if you have already created Gerber files, there are ways to do
it)
https://github.com/madworm/KiCad-Stuff/tree/master/scripts/visual-diffs_on_gerber-files
You can see in the README how this can be used directly from Git

Best,
Jon

On Sat, Feb 18, 2017 at 8:31 AM, Clemens Koller <cko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi, Andy!
>
> On 2017-02-17 19:51, Andy Peters wrote:
> >> On Feb 17, 2017, at 8:31 AM, Clemens Koller <cko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> And: In the long-term we might also think about using git for project
> and design management and versioning. (We could even store undo's and
> redo's in git?)
> >
> > Except that not everyone likes or uses git. I use Subversion for my
> projects.
>
> Sure. That's why people created git svn...
> Sometimes it just might be sufficient to consider that there are already
> some solutions out there.
>
> But as others suggested already:
> Nobody should need to mess with an scm tool on a daily basis when doing
> electronics design.
> It should be wrapped nicely behind the frontends.
>
> Regards,
>
> Clemens
>
>
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