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

Whenever I see a library in a Subversion directory, I ask the following questions:

• what version is it? (usually you have axis.jar and not axis-1.4.jar)
• why was it included? (especially tricky with dependencies of dependencies)

If you don't have a dependency management system in place, you normally can't answer both questions. And it's the first step to Jar Hell.

I can recommend Apache Ivy (other may swear by Maven) with an intranet repository. Using Ivy, I never had to store libraries into SVN and could always answer the above mentioned questions.