Is it acceptable/good to store binaries in SVN?

Question

We would like to share runtime project binary files. So every team member could take current working version. It is acceptable/good to store runtime binaries in the SVN?

Answer 1

As many have already said, it's acceptable.

Yes, it is convenient to have everything handy from one location, from where you can (for example) checkout an older tag already in binary form with its correct dependencies.

But it is NOT good, especially for backup purposes. We stored all our binaries (and part of the dependencies) in SVN and as the project grew, so that binary section did.

Unfortunately, svnadmin dump just dumps everything, you cannot specify a path of the repository to exclude. Thus, backups (and upgrades of the svn server) became very painful!

If you add that after a not-so-long time in our case those binaries were not useful anymore, I'm sure I will not do that again in a similar case (but I would do for a smaller project).

So I would recommend to think twice before doing that and try to forecast how big can you grow and what else might happen.