noob questions (migrating from CVI)

[ElectroLund]

Hey there everyone.  I'm in the process of likely migration to LabVIEW.  One of the things that concerns me is revision control.  Someone pointed me to this group, and I'm pretty excited to see that there seems to be a visual tool for comparing VIs.  Nifty!

Is git the only CVS supported?  We've been using Subversion for our LabWindows CVI forever.  I'm not opposed to switching the CVS also, just curious.

[RVallieu · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the pixel side!

TortoiseSVN toolkits used to be available for use with LabVIEW and SVN.  I haven't utilized SVN in many years with LabVIEW at this point though.  

https://www.ni.com/en-us/support/downloads/tools-network/download.tortoisesvn-toolkit-for-labview.ht...

The VI Compare functionality doesn't integrate super well with the GIT SCC - I played around with trying to get it to work with SourceTree - but our team has pretty much stopped using GUI based SCC with GIT and gone to the command line interface.

[NathanDII]

Doing a "diff" of VI's is not dependent on which version control system you use.  It is actually an application that is provided with LabVIEW.  You can find this application at "%ProgramFiles%\National Instruments\Shared\LabVIEW Compare\LVCompare.exe" (it exists for both 32- and 64-bit, each provided in the respective program files folder).  This is a command line tool so it doesn't have any fancy GUI but if you just double click on it, it will show you some info about how to use it.

There are some posts about getting it to work with git (something that I use) and I think I've heard of it being used with other version control systems including SVN.  I think that in something like TortoiseSVN, they have the ability to configure a custom diff tool for certain file extensions.  When I was using SVN, I used the LabVIEW addon called "Viewpoint TSVN Toolkit".  I think JKI has their own version too.

If you're looking at using Git, you can look at Easiest Way to Setup LVCompare and LVMerge - NI Community to see how to get something set up for integrating LVCompare into Git.  With this, I think I have to initiate the diff from the command line, I haven't been able to get it to work with Fork (the GUI I use for Git repos).

[ElectroLund]

Ahh, indeed. I see the Labview Compare tool already exists, that's pretty sweet.

And I see the TortoiseSVN toolkit is still available, though I'm not clear what that provides me above my already-installed Tortoise (we use that front end here).  In fact, I see that NI has instructions for manual setup of your Tortoise to call the compare tool.  That would appear to give me exactly what I'm after.

Thanks!!

[NathanDII]

I never used the JKI version but with the Viewpoint version, it actually added a tool bar to the project window and integrated the icon overlay to show the status of the file in the project file tree.