What is Bazaar Pro/E Helper?

The aim of this Project is to provide a set of tools to use the Bazaar VCS to handle PTC Pro Engineer CAD files. It currently has a utility (bzr proclean) to clean up and normalise a Pro/E Working directory to prepare it to be stored in Bazaar.

Compatibility

This plugin is tested with bazaar version up to 2.0.3 future version may work but there is no guarantee.

Installation

Just copy the proe.py file into your Bazaar plug-in directory. By default these is:

Linux and Mac OS X: ~/.bazaar/plugins

Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data\Bazaar\2.0\plugins

More information about Bazaar plugin installation can be found under: http://bazaar-vcs.org/UsingPlugins

Usage

Important: It it recommended to close Pro/E before you make any changes to the directory, as changes on the Pro/E working directory may confuse the current session of Pro/E.

If you first want to see what the tool does, just type:

$ bzr proclean --dry-run

in the directory you want to clean. If you are sure and want to do the changes type:

$ bzr proclean

and your directory will be cleaned up. Now you can check it in as you would with any other project.

If you want bazaar to clean all unnecessary files append the –purge option:

$ bzr proclean --purge

If you need further information about using Bazaar please refer to: http://bazaar-vcs.org/Documentation

How does it work?

PTC Pro/Engineer normally stores files with an ending “.x” which it increments after every save. If you have a part named “object” Pro/E saves a file called “object.prt” after a second save it creates a new file called “object.prt.1” and so forth. This has the advantage that you can go back to older versions, but it is not optimal if you are using a version control system because the filename changes every time you save a file. To workaround this problem bzr-proe normalises the files before storing them into the VCS. This normalisation is achieved by deleting all but the newest version of a file and by removing the trailing “.x” from it.