Is there some internal Xilinx conspiracy against source code management like SVN (subversion) and CVS? Or is it that the Xilinx guys don't use version control to understand the goals?
ISE 6.x used ".npl" files to contain the project information. These were text-based making them at least somewhat SCM-friendly, but they changed each and every time you saved the project even if nothing changed. Some date code changed. Thus requiring an update...
ISE 7.x came along and, even when the rest of the world was switching to XML because of all the problems with binary config files, Xilinx decided to move to a binary format ".ise" from it's .npl files. Now, each SCM checkin required the whole binary file to be checked in each time rather than just diffs (like the ISE 6.x days).
ISE 8.x came along and the conspiracy became clearer. Xilinx held on to its binary format but has apparently added a LOT more to the file. Now, it's almost 1 MB!!! This means that my SCM repository grows by 1 MB EACH TIME I do a checkin if I include the ISE file. That's ridiculous!
PLEASE Xilinx, be learn about CVS, SVN, and others, and how to design file formats for SCM. Also, place all temporary files in a temp directory and stop spamming my project directory. Oh, and one more thing -- it would be nice to know which files from a CORE are necessary to the project. Each CORE generates almost a dozen files and I'd rather not add all of them to SCM.
Jake