Should I put my output files in source control?

Posted by sebastiaan on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by sebastiaan
Published on 2009-12-07T07:16:59Z Indexed on 2010/04/02 3:03 UTC
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I've been asked to put every single file in my project under source control, including the database file (not the schema, the complete file).

This seems wrong to me, but I can't explain it. Every resource I find about source control tells me not to put generated output files in a source control system. And I understand, it's not "source" files.

However, I've been presented with the following reasoning:

Who cares? We have plenty of bandwidth.
I don't mind having to resolve a conflict each time I get the latest revision, it's just one click
It's so much more convenient than having to think about good ignore files
- Also, if I have to add an external DLL file in the bin folder now, I can't forget to put it in source control, as the bin folder is not being ignored now.

The simple solution for the last bullet-point is to add the file in a libraries folder and reference it from the project.

Please explain if and why putting generated output files under source control is wrong.

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