How to store binaries along tree

[Anteru]

Hi,

I have the following problem: I have a project where we have lots of
source code and we also need to store binary files in the source tree.
For the binary files, we typically only need the "latest" version --
i.e. it would be ok to connect to the server for any history-related
operation. We're using Bazaar for the source code, which works fine.
However, we don't store binaries in the Bazaar source code branch, as
this would require too much bandwidth/client side storage.

We're talking about binaries with a few hundred KiB up to tens/hundreds
of MiB, with most of them in the 500 KiB - 50 MiB range. Some of them
tend to change rather often, but we only sync a few revisions with our
source code drops (i.e. some on the data branch might be invisible for
source branch users.) Our server is pretty beefy with lots of disk
space, so we have no problem storing them, it's just we don't want to
pollute the main source code repository with them.

Is there a way to have one subfolder of the source code repository
branch being linked to another repository, doing a lightweight checkout
there? I.e. having a /bin subfolder which pulls in from another Bazaar
repository? If it's not possible with Bazaar, could it be made to work
with SVN for instance? Alternatively: Could we add a repository hook
which gets executed on the client side using the Bazaar Python runtime?
This would allow us to manually hack this in (even though I would like
to avoid the last solution, as we would wind up with Python 2.x code
while the rest of our codebase is Python 3.2, but it should be pretty
limited/self-contained.)

Cheers,
  Anteru