Ingenious way to deal with binaries using SVN?

[Geminias]

Hi. I avoided versioning binaries like dll's, images, audio files, etc... But it is a real pain in the ass to rebuild the directory structure with all the files to compile and run.

Does anyone know an ingenious way around this predicament?

Currently I take my directory structure complete with all the binaries and copy it over top of the svn working copy folder. Then I revert the svn working copy. But it is a pain in the ass explaining how to do this to all my junior developers...

[DemonWasp]

What I've always seen done is that someone writes a build script to just build everything for you (there are tools like make and ANT for this). Then, you just type something like ant build.all and go get a coffee for the next 15 minutes. Turns this into a less hackish 2-step process:

1. svn update
2. cd buildtools\ANT\; ant build.all

[rizzix]

When you copy files to your working directory, you haven't really added them to your svn repository! Files are added to the repo only when you explicitly "add" them through svn. So don't worry about the binaries just use them as they were, just make sure you don't add them to the repo, that's all.

[Tony]

you could also explicitly add a svn:ignore flag onto the files that you don't want to be included in source control -- those will be ignored and will not clutter "not added" lists, and such.

And DemonWasp is onto a nice idea. Build tools are awesome. Personally I use rake, which is a make~like tool, but in Ruby. Makes deploying software ridiculously easy (once the deploy script is written, that is).