To facilitate building a kitchen sink installer for our app we have several large binary files (.Net Framework and SQL Server Express redistributable installers) in our application repository. The problem is that checking the files to make sure they’re unchanged and simply grabbing a fresh copy of the trunk are really bogged down because of the size of the files.
Is there any way we could either mark the files not to be checked out by default, or to be checked for changes every time we do an update?
If you’re having problems with large files that change infrequently, you might consider putting those files in a separate repository. With the Subversion “externals” feature, you can attach this external repository to your main repository so you can, if you like, check out the complete project. But if you don’t need the installer files you can choose not to get them, and local repository operations on your code repository won’t involve the big files.