Re: Using Git for applications other than code development

From: Konstantin Khomoutov <kostix@bswap.ru>
Date: Jul 25, 2018, 14:48 UTC
Message-ID: <20180725144826.wznifhnrahav6tdv@tigra>
In-Reply-To: <4b9575bf039e46cd9dc150111916e734@LINCEXCHANGE1.dynexsemi.com>

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 01:02:16PM +0000, David Hind wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I work for a company that is looking to adopt VCS and I like sound of
> Git (although I have no experience of using VCS). My question is,
> everything seems to be directed towards code developers. Can I use Git
> to do revision control for other types of design document? For example
> electrical circuit designs, circuit PCB designs etc.?

In addition to what Randall said (I would affirm he has presented a comprehensive and correct picture), I'd make one minor note: Git is a distributed VCS, and this requires certain pondering.

Even though you will almost certainly have one central (also colloquially called "rendez-vouz") repository where everyone pushes their changes to, and fetches them from, Git allows recording any number of so-called "commits" — atomic, from a logical standpoint, changes to the project — before sharing them with the rest of the team.

For software development, this _is_ blessing; for other kinds of development it may be not so good — with the need to somehow resolve possible conflicts in series of changes made in parallel by multiple developers to the same content being supposedly the main impediment. With software development it's simple: it's still done by writing textual files (even tools which generate code automatically tend to generate something textual these days), and conflicts in textual files are relatively easy to represent (even without resorting to specialized tools). Now, say, let's look at gamedev where a part of the team are artists which work on "assets" — such as 3D-models and textures. Two conflicting changes in the same texture are harder to reconcile.

Some (most?) centralized VCSes (as opposed to distibuted) support explicit "locking" of certain files - which works like sort of claim "I'm working on this file, don't touch it". Git does not have locking, and if you think it may benefit your workflow then may be other options might suite you better.