Identical LabVIEW Environments - Entire LabVIEW 8.5 folder under SVN?

[amaglio]

We run LabVIEW on a few different machines and we want to be able to keep things the same from one machine to the next as much as possible. We want to keep the palettes, environment options, menus, available instrument drivers, openG libraries, etc. So initially what I did was put the following files and folders under SVN:

C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.5\instr.lib

C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.5\user.lib

C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.5\menus

C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.5\labview.ini

...\LabVIEW Data\8.5\Palettes

This worked great, but that after poking around in the LabVIEW 8.5 directory I began to realize that JKI and openG has folders and files other places, such as in the examples folder.

What is the best way to do this??

I want to be able to keep the environments the same without having to actually use the VI Package Manager all the time on all of the machines, Ideally I would like to be able to do it on one machine and then just update the SVN folders on the other machines.

I was considering putting the entire LabVIEW 8.5 folder under SVN, is there any reason not to do this? 

[tst]

First, it's probably a large folder. My LV 2009 folder is more than 1GB, even after removing the user.lib folder which blows it to considerably more.

Second, you would still need to install LV on the machine (or you'd probably have problem with missing registry settings, DLLs, services, etc.). Once you do that, you can probably rename the LV folder and check out the SVN folder, but I still wouldn't be positive it would work properly (although it probably would).

Here are two options I can think of off-hand:

1. Use a virtual machine and just give each developer a copy. This is not as comfortable as working on your own machine (although the VM can be made full-screen) and it has some hardware support problems, but is very useful if you have multiple LV versions.
2. VIPM has a feature called VIPC, which is a file which tells VIPM the exact condition of the computer (which packages are installed, etc.). When you invoke this file (when you open a specific project) it tells VIPM to install the correct packages with the correct versions. You could probably use this to automate the package update process somewhat. I don't know which versions of VIPM have this, although I believe the free version at least can't create it.

[amaglio]

Thanks for your response tst. LabVIEW is already installed on the different machines, I knew I wasn't going to get away from doing that. I know that the folder will be pretty big, like you said more than 1GB, mine is about 1.3GB, but most of the stuff won't be changing much so after the initial port into SVN and check out to each machine the size shouldn't matter too much. 

I am not too fond of the virtual machine idea, like you said its not really the ideal setting. Also, 3 of the 4 machines that I am looking to do this on will be communicating with instruments. This could cause some issues if setting up virtual machines.

The VIPM sounds interesting, I am going to look into this one a bit more.

[amaglio]

Are there differences in the LabVIEW 8.5 directory if LabVIEW has been installed on different operating systems, for example Windows XP and Windows 7?