Bitbucket effectiveness for Revision Control of ME & EE Files

[Niall Motson]

My company is looking to consolidate our project files as much as possible. We have both a CS and an Engineering team, but at times we work in close collaboration across fields. I know revision control is quite different between programming code and ME/EE engineering files (.sldprt, .slddrw, .sldasm, .sch, .pcb, etc) but I'm wondering if Bitbucket could effectively be implemented for both types of files? For the ME/EE files (CAD, schematics, PCB Layout, etc.) I believe the versions will be lost, but could the major revisions be saved, updated, manipulated and released in a similar manner to code? Does anyone have experience doing this? If not, do you have any recommendations for other solutions?

Cheers!

[Seth · Accepted solution]

There is no reason Git could not version those types of files. For any that are not text-based, you wouldn't be able to use features like viewing diffs or committing portions of a changed file, but that shouldn't interfere with the general usefulness of a versioning system, which is keeping a record of how files have changed.

[Niall Motson]

Great, that is exactly what I hoped/expected to hear. I'm not worried about losing some of the features/benefits of Git, just looking for the basic ability to record significant revisions of ME/EE files in an organized way on the same main repository as the one used for our code.

[Niall Motson]

Edited to include file types (.sldprt, .slddrw, .sldasm, .sch, .pcb, etc).

Thanks!

[tlroche]

I suggest you edit your question to indicate the ME/EE file formats you wish to version. Both git and hg (the bits of Bitbucket that do VC, and are therefore relevant to your question) are useful for versioning "programming code" because files containing the latter are almost always just plain text (often ASCII, though these days often Unicode). VC tools (including git and hg) are usually less good at versioning non-text/BLOB formats, because the latter are harder to diff.