Basic Version Control for Creo

[Stopchangingthi]

The current version control system Creo seems to consist of naming files A.prt.1 sequentially to A.prt.n and while this may be state of the art for 1985, I have trouble understanding why Creo ships with such a primitive system now. Without any additional licensing it should support a modern version control system like git http://git-scm.com/ to provide basic version control for customers who don't need a full product lifecycle management system and just want to keep track of their files. In fact it would be trivial to implement if the parts didn't have the version number automatically saved to the end.

While the compare part tool exists it seems like a leftover feature someone forgot to delete, and there should be an easier way to compare the changes between two versions of the same part. If I work on a part and then someone else works it should be trivially easy to compare A.prt.28 to A.prt.32

To improve collaboration there should also be support to visually merge two versions by selecting which features to keep or discard.

[MartinHanak]

You can ask GIT developers to imlement new feature - the ability to ignore second extension of Creo files (i.e. .n).

Martin Hanak

[Stopchangingthi]

That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it will work. Instead of ignoring the second extension, git would need find the file with the highest integer valued extension and use that file as if it had no second extension. Also, I'm not sure that the git developers would accept a patch for this as I don't know of any other programs that save files like this.

[DHLewis]

Simple solution...Use Intralink.  Will be much better than any other Version Control software.  Intralink will be as simple as Intralink 3.x.

[Stopchangingthi]

I have not had a chance to use it but Intralink seems like a terrible solution.

It supports LDAP and appears to require a seperate server. This makes it clear that it is too complex for a single seat install of Creo and the licensing costs will be unacceptable due to the countless usless features.

While Intralink supports all sorts of features that are unnecessary for a small company, it doesn't support modern distributed version control architectures used in modern software development.

As per the whitepaper http://www.ptc.com/appserver/wcms/standards/fileothumbredirect.jsp?&im_dbkey=83424&icg_dbkey=841

"Pro/INTRALINK is one of PTC’s most successful products and is viewed as a very mature and powerful solution" and "However, as their needs evolve, many customers are beginning to realize that the Pro/INTRALINK 3.x1 solution has some technology constraints."

So translating from marketing speak, it is old, bloated and technically limited based on old version control concepts that are condisered obsolete in the software development community.

If PTC can't make a product that solves our problems, why can't there be an option to disable the file extension so we can fix the problem ourselves?

If it can't be removed because it is buried too deeply into the core of what creo is, can we get an option to run a program every time we save a drawing or part?