Binary file handling

[Tom Widmer]

Dmitri Pissarenko wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> On
> 
> http://bazaar-vcs.org/FAQ#head-e6448836a60a73c1954f287ef5e928b79e3ff005
> 
> I read
> 
>> That said, bzr is primarily a source code control system, not a media archive system. So it is not a
>> priority to support enormous (hundred-megabyte) binaries or multi-gigabyte trees. There are other tools better suited to that.
> 
> I have a Java project with many binary files (actually, it is a JBoss
> Seam project). These binary files are Java libraries (JARs, more than
> 100 MB) and it is not possible to build them from source code with
> little effort. It is essential that changes of these binaries are
> tracked, otherwise it may happen that the system suddenly doesn't work
> - nothing has changed in the source code, but some binary has a
> different version.
> 
> Imagine following situation: You have a test environment (JBoss
> application server in this case) against which you test your system.
> You want to make sure that any changes to this test environment
> (directory with many large binary files) are tracked somehow (and that
> you can revert any change).
> 
> If I want to
> 
> a) use Bazaar for version control for this project and
> b) somehow control changes of binary files (with Bazaar or some other tool),
> 
> what tools may I use for this?

If you're talking about 3rd party dependency binaries, I'd set up an 
enterprise Maven or Apache Ivy repository (depending on whether you are 
building using Maven2 or Ant). The repository itself need not be 
versioned, since you'll only add files, and not modify them. You can 
keep it on a protected (and backed up) network share, or have an FTP 
site, or put it behind Apache, or use a dedicated server such as 
Artifactory. See http://maven.apache.org/ and http://ant.apache.org/ivy/

Tom