using git to keep exes and dlls?

Question

I'm new to version control so please excuse if this question is very basic.

From my understanding GIT is a code version control. we develop a lot of windows applications whose final releases are either .exe or .dll files.

my question is simple how does one handle the final releases of the exe's and dll's? do we use the git repository and keep the .exe/.dll files with the source code when we make a release? or git is not the right tool to manage the versions of the final .exe/.dll files and do we need something else?

how do other organizations handle this? if we need some other application for this what is a simple workflow to handle code version control and final releases of these applications?

Answer 1

You could keep them stored in git. But I would not put them in the same repository as your source code. You want that repository to be fast. You could link the exe/dll repository to the source one via submodules and that would tie them together. (Good point in the comments below about this)

I usually don't bother "versioning" them like that but keep a back up of all artifacts produced that made it to production.

Some like to use git as the delivery mechanism to move DLLs and EXEs to production.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

No, version control software isn't normally used to manage binaries. Don't do it unless you're using external libraries or the like in your project. Release binaries are usually archived elsewhere (and backed up).

Technically, the source code in the version control is tagged every time a major or a patch release is made. If in the event the archived binaries are lost, you can always go back to this state and re-create the binaries by recompiling.