On Tue Jan 27 20:38 , Peter Clifton  sent:

>How do commercial tools deal with this?

Poorly :)
Altium bolts up to Subversion, but its hard going. The inevitable problems are
inevitable. Fortunately, storage space is getting cheaper, but my working
repository (I do stuff other than Balloon) is just under 1TByte. 

>An exclusive checkout work-flow probably suits electronic designs well,
>as long as the files being worked on are modular enough that small
>pieces can be locked for modification by a given developer.

It certainly works in my world, since I work in small teams (often just me). I
would hate to try to enforce version control on a multi-person project. Then
again, multi-person projects normally move far more slowly than standalone stuff. 

>I don't imagine it would work well with the decentralised, distributed
>model which we find works well for open source software development.

Yes. I think this would simply lead to a thousand irreconcilable branches. 

>(Conflicts tend to be avoided by knowing what other people are working
>on, and resolved by merging changes at the commit stage).

Per-sheet of schematic would be tolerable. Once the PCB was started, things would
get tricky. I do find that running the tail end of the schematic design in
parallel with the start of the PCB maximises the efficiency, as appropriate
changes can be inserted for free. I can't see that working well with automated
tools, compared to shouting across the lab and checking changes off on a whiteboard. 

>We could look at how changes on a schematic could be merged for conflict
>resolution, but I suspect the UI would be rather harder than with the
>lines of text case.

Yes. This is hard, with a capital H. I'm not sure it's possible, and I'm very
sure that gEDA has more profitable fish to fry. This one's a stinker. 

>Quick question.. are the majority of Balloon developers / users Linux,
>Windows or Mac OS users on their primary desktop / development
>platforms? 

I'm resolutely Windows, for EDA stuff. Altium/Protel, LTSpice and Modelsim for
simulation, Xilinx and Altera tools for FPGAs. Random programming widgets, random
microcontroller development environments, Solidworks (and Turbocad - spit) for
mechanical. I fear that Linux is a no-show. 
For what little software I do, and what text editing I do, then it's Linux.
Documentation is OS agnostic. Web browsing / datasheet rummaging is mostly
Windows, as my serious machine is Windows. Linux support for serious monitors and
graphics cards is too hard for me to feel the need to cope with. If I had a horde
of minions to try suff, I'd probably move more towards Linux, but, at the moment,
I'm getting more done using tools that run under Windows. (Note - the OS is,
pretty much, an irrelevance. It launches the apps I want and provides the device
drivers I want. The UI and built-in stuff are trivial.

Steve


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