[ale] General Question on managing Orcad design archives

[cfowler]

On Mon, 2002-07-01 at 15:54, John Mills wrote:
> Hello -
> 
> I have set up a CVS server for source code and some 'release' binaries
> built from those sources. This generally seems to be working.

cvs add -vb on those binaries or they may be damaged.  I've been screwed
before.

> 
> I am now looking into managing Orcad board layouts from the same server
> and repository. I identify (with linux 'file *') primarily two groups of
> types among the design files:
>  *.BOM - DOS/ASCII text
>  *.ONL - (ditto)
>  *.opj - (ditto), and
>  *.DSN - binary, as "Microsoft Office Document"
>  *.DBK - (ditto)
> 
> I would expect CVS to handle the DOS/ASCII files with no problems.
This is fine.  It may try to convert the nl/cr but this can easily be
tested.

> 
> However, if CVS handles those binary (*.DSN, *.DBK) types I expect it
> might archive revisions by 'plugging together' succeeding binaries, with
> consequent bloat as working revisions are stored. Is this correct? Is
> there a cleaner way to handle these types of files with regards to
> efficient storage of work-in-progress backups?

Yea your right.  CVS does not know about binary files.  to add a binary
file you can use cvs add -kb <filename> Or you can edit CVS/cvswrapper
to automagically treat it as binary whenever it comes across a file with
the .DSN extension.
> 
> Naturally I would not expect a 'merge' operation to give sensible results
> (either as to adding two workers' changes or of identifying conflicts), if
> these are truly binary files.

There is no merge operation.  It will just add and add.  In effect
you'll have a full version of each .DSN revision.

Can you tell me about Orcad?  Is it OpenSource? I've been looking for an
OS board layout program.

CVS will not run in Windows in server mode.  You can use a cvs server on
Linux and use a Windoze CVS client.  This will probably be your best
bet.

> 
> Thanks for any general or specific comments on this problem.
> 
>  - John Mills
> 
> 
> 
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