Hacker News Reader

Comment by digdugdirk | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. One thing I've pondered - this project contains various pieces of off the shelf hardware, and some custom 3D CAD files. These don't seem to fit as neatly into the way Git functions. Is there/has there been any attempts to replicate Git with Bill of Materials or 3D CAD data?

View on HN

There are many softwares attempting to solve this problem. Airplanes, bridges, cars, robots, they are catalogued in these systems. They tend to fall under the "Product Lifecycle Management" or 'PLM' name of softwares. Or also "Product Data Management"/'PDM'. Tends to be enterprisey.

I've used those systems previously. Sadly, none seems to be functional on a distributed scale like Git functions for codebases.

You can specify custom diff algorithms to git, so you could say all .dwg files get diffed with something which knows how to parse the binary data and present a reasonable diff between the two versions?

Perforce and Plastic SCM are heavily used in certain industries. I think they're both superior to Git.

Plastic seems heavily tied to unity, so thats a hard pass for those of us who dont want to be slave to an engine.

It was purchased by Unity, but I don't see anything that heavily ties it to Unity. I've used it locally, and it certainly didn't require any Unity dependencies.

I guess if that data can be easily represented as plain text then git would work ok?

I'm almost of the opinion that it should be thrown back on the software to convert their save files to text where possible. Binary files just aren't great for a wide range of issues further than just git.

The data for CAD exchange files is usually plain text, the problem is that the exporter doesn't try to preserve the same order of stuff as previous times that it was saved.

That seems almost asinine. It should be trivial to have a standard sorting algorithm so any implementation produces the same result.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com