Question

The issue we have is a customer supplies us with content to include in releases, and this includes a lot of video files. Their content generally goes in SVN but since they don’t have access to it, versioning these large binary files doesn’t really seem to fit SVN well. Our testing doesn’t require these files (we just have to test we can launch a video if it’s found) and we aren’t responsible for checking/testing the customer’s supplied content.

So I wondered if it’s possible to have a SVN dir which isn’t versioned, and is just a regular directory which can still be pulled when updating/checking-out?
Or maybe SVN has a way to pull files from a non-SVN source, somewhat like svn:externals but not looking at another repo?

Is there a SVN solution to this, or if we want to avoid versioning the files should we simply put them in another store and configure a build/deploy script to pull them separately?

Answer 1

Is the problem the bridge between your client and the SVN repo, or the versioning of binary files ?

For the second one, I think there’s no big deal. Read from here : http://help.collab.net/index.jsp?topic=/faq/svnbinary.html

Note that whether or not a file is
binary does not affect the amount of
repository space used to store changes
to that file, nor does it affect the
amount of traffic between client and
server. For storage and transmission
purposes, Subversion uses a diffing
method that works equally well on
binary and text files; this is
completely unrelated to the diffing
method used by the svn diff command.

Since versioning of big files can be rude for developers when updating/committing small changes, you can use a dedicated series of branches.