Question

I want to version my visual studio 2010 debug builds. I’m going to use git. Right now all the project files are in ‘project’ and the output binaries are put by visual studio in the directory ‘project\debug’. I’ve read a few questions on here that have ignore lists for Visual Studio but most of them have an ignore list that ignores the binary files, like the obj exe idb pdb ilk etc.

If I want to be able to debug my exe in the future what files do I need to keep? Is there any reason to keep the obj files? Does VS use them at all during debugging or tracing a crash? I thought I should keep at least the the pdb files and the exe. So that would be project.exe, project.pdb and vc100.pdb. But what about vc100.idb, project.ilk, project.res… etc. Is there an ignore list that will ignore everything that isn’t needed to keep binary builds but keep everything that is?

I want to make sure if a user sends me a crash dump or reports a problem at some point in the future that I can go back to the version that was being used and be able to debug it. I had also hoped to make the binaries and debug files available in a remote repo so that anyone else could as well. Thanks!

Answer 1

I’m going to keep project.exe and project.pdb in the branch. The other files like *.obj, *.ilk, and *.sdf are not needed. Neither are the vc100.* files. I made my decision after speaking to a number of people in person and reviewing this:

File Types Created for Visual C++ Projects

and this:

Which Visual C++ file types should be committed to version control?

Although that SO question/answer does not answer my question it gave me a lot of good information. I also looked through my project.pdb for all the file references to confirm which files in my project that I needed to keep around. I used this command from the debugging tools for windows:

srcsrv\srctool -r project.pdb