I’m working with a team that will soon be coding a bunch of Java apps as part of a larger project. We are planning to use SVN for our source code, but we will have dependencies on a number of other teams who are NOT using SVN. They will basically be coding a number of libraries (in the form of a .jar) that we will utilize in our apps.
I understand that we might be able to use svn:externals if everyone was on SVN, but that doesn’t seem possible in the near future. For now we’ll probably just get updated .jar files from them about once a week.
I’m still relatively new to SVN, so what is the proper procedure for handling this? Do we check their .jar into our repository? Or should we avoid having binaries in the SCM like that? We’ve also explored using dependency management via Maven…which seems like a good option for sharing binaries between the teams, but I’m not sure if we really want something that complex.
Checking in libraries, especially third party ( in your case I think you can call them third party ), into SVN ( or any SCM ) is not a big deal and you get so much gains from the simplicity of that. Caveat that with if the jars or libs being too huge and also change frequently, you might go for more complexity ( like Maven, Ivy etc.)
And SVN is good at handling binary files and their diffs.