Subversion Clients for the computer challenged

Ok so my boss told me to look up subversion clients online because he wants the two of us mechanical engineers to start revising. Every article I have found on it makes no sense except that it does something to keep track of revisions of stuff. How does this thing work with CAD drawings? And why do I think I am going to hate it?

It works the same with CAD drawings as anything else...for anything sufficiently large or complicated the additional PITA factor of using it easily pays off.

Here are some clients you can try:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/569278/your-favorite-gui-client-for-svn

Edit: Looking at them I think this is probably the easiest to use:

http://rapidsvn.tigris.org/

GameboyRMH wrote: It works the same with CAD drawings as anything else...for anything sufficiently large or complicated the additional PITA factor of using it easily pays off.

How do I use them? Do you have to know programming? I mean we already have a revision system in place. Aka we have a revision block on the drawings and save the drawings as a new revision.

You don't have to know programming, the "official" subversion client is CLI based, and the commands you use to update or checkout objects are the scary looking computer language you're seeing not much different to SCP commands if you've used those, or DOS copy commands from the old days.

Whether it's better than your current system really depends on the scale of it and how much "work overlap" you have. If you've ever had a problem of finding where someone had the latest updates to a drawing, or if they were currently working on it or not, you'll wonder where it's been all your life.

GameboyRMH wrote: You don't have to know programming, the "official" subversion client is CLI based, and the commands you use to update or checkout objects are the scary looking computer language you're seeing not much different to SCP commands if you've used those, or DOS copy commands from the old days. Whether it's better than your current system really depends on the scale of it and how much "work overlap" you have. If you've ever had a problem of finding where someone had the latest updates to a drawing, or if they were currently working on it or not, you'll wonder where it's been all your life.

Things I had to look up from this post. CLI, SCP and DOS.

I have never really struggled with find drawings or anything. To me what we have now is pretty damn straight forward.

I suspect that most of the features of an advanced version control system like subversion are pretty useless for CAD drawings. They're really designed to work with text-file source code, to allow two people to make changes to a set of files at the same time and then do most of the work in figuring out how to merge those two changes together. Branches, merging, diffs, those are all basically useless with a binary file like a CAD drawing.

It sounds like all you really need is something that will let you check in new versions, annotate the versions with comments, and provide an easy way to back up the database of previous revisions. I'm sure subversion will do that if you want it to, but it's overkill.

The above sounds about right.

For background, as codrus points out, it's really meant for text-based stuff, where it can be really, really useful, by actually showing you which parts of which lines differ between versions and other awesome stuff.

The last place I worked was trying to get the designers to put their photoshop files in such a system. There was some resistance, which was understandable, but there were also instances of sending the wrong version of a .psd to a client because the only way to tell the damn things apart was filenames like final_FINAL_20121203.psd

It sounds like you have a marking in each item that should tell the version, but does it require you to modify that block, or does that happen automatically? Some means of marking something with version info on "submission" (however you define that) is a good thing...