On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 2:43 PM, <Kevin.Stevens@barclayscapital.com> wrote:

I agree that it is awkward, and can seriously deteriorate the performance of some source control systems, but it is common and often necessary. I have even heard of some firms that put their compilers and build tools under source control as well, so that at any point in time in the future, they can go back and recreate a build, if they still have compatible hardware. Some systems like Perforce really didn't deal well (as of ~5 years ago) with a large number of large binaries in the system.

Why necessary? I have worked in environments in which the Boost libraries are under svn control,
and consider the practise to be a total disaster, which I would move heaven & earth to avoid in future!
The Boost libraries are pretty huge, which makes a full checkout a fairly heavyweight task, which
strongly discourages "experimental" activity in a temporary checkout. Putting Boost under SVN also
tends to nail-down the version since updating to more recent Boost (and possibly reverting later)
becomes quite high cost compared to touching a path in a makefile somewhere.

A released Boost version is (I believe) a completely fixed thing, so putting in a system whose
purpose is track change seems bizarre to me.

Just my $0.02 worth.

- Rob.