Arguments for and against including 3rd-party libraries in version control? [closed]

Answer 1

Yes you should (when feasible).

You should be able to take a fresh machine and build your project with as few steps as possible. For me, it's:

1. Install IDE (e.g. Visual Studio)
2. Install VCS (e.g. SVN)
3. Checkout
4. Build

Anything more has to have very good justification.

Here's an example: I have a project that uses Yahoo's YUI compressor to minify JS and CSS. The YUI .jar files go in source control into a tools directory alongside the project. The Java runtime however, does not--that has become a prereq for the project much like the IDE. Considering how popular JRE is, it seems like a reasonable requirement.