at the moment, if Amy and Bob want to work on the same IFC file, Amy has to commit her work and and push it to a repository, then Bob can check out this file, work on it and push it back - But Amy has to agree not to make any changes while Bob is working - otherwise there will be an unresolvable merge conflict.

So currently if you are working on an IFC file in Blenderbim and comitting changes to git, this is extremely efficient - Updates are small and the git database grows very slowly - You should do this already for perfect change control, tracking and rollbacks.Ĭollaborative working via git involves forking and merging (typically via pull requests), this doesn't work currently with IFC, at all. In practice, Blenderbim (I haven't tested Freecad) is already extremely git friendly, if you edit an IFC file and save it, the only things that change are: the FILE_NAME() header (where the time-stamp is updated) entities where parameters have changed are updated in-place, so this is a single line change new entities are appended to the end of the file and deleted entities are simply removed without renumbering any other entities. IFC STEP files are plain text and line-based, so in principle they should play nicely with tools like git/mercurial etc. An IFC merge tool would enable fully collaborative BIM via git repositories.

Three way merge tool windows