Storing generated files in Git

Question

We have a reasonably large, and far too messy code base that we wish to migrate to using Git. At the moment, it\'s a big monolithic chunk that can\'t easily be split into smalle

Answer 1

The ideal solution is to avoid versioning binaries and store them in an artifact repository like Nexus.

The issue with deliveries in a VCS is that a VCS is design to record and keep the history of all files it manages, whereas:

• many versions of a delivery are intermediate builds that will need to be cleaned up at one point or another
• cleaning (removing old versions) is quite hard to do in a VCS, very easy to do in an artifact repository.
• the size of a repo will become an issue (especially for a DVCS, unless you always get the latest version, in which case a shallow clone might alleviate that issue)
• there is no way of comparing a version of a binary with another (so "versioning" don't make a lot of sense)