Deployed a version control system for company, how to use it with binary files

I am tasked with setup a Mercurial version control system for our small team of developers (2-3 person). There was no version control system before, just shared folders and multi-copies. I don't have much experience in setting version control system except for personal projects, just happened to be the most experienced person in term of version control system in our team. The code repository is in a shared folder in centre server, the top leve directory is client name, one level down is project name for that client.

The problems is I haven't figure out how to deal with binary files in our code repository. From what I read, the binary files shouldn't be version tracked. But开发者_运维知识库 as the code repository is centralized on the server, shouldn't the binary in here as well? Otherwise for things like image file, and third-party dll files, the project wouldn't build or run properly when cloned from centre server. Also there is a nice feature for Mercurial web interface where you can download the whole source package as ZIP or BZ2 compressed file, without necessary binary files, the download project wouldn't run or compile.

I guess the solution is including everything for the version control system except the temporary files and the files for debug purpose, but other than that, most binary files should be included? Due to limitation of version control system, I don't think there is a way for them to track changes sets only for binary files, so I guess we have to deal with it for a version control system.

Edit: After more research about how to setup version-control repository, the more recommended way of using version-control is to "store everything which is created manually, and nothing else", quote from Eric Sink.

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You want to version control anything that you can't generate from other stuff in version control. That would be your source files, and your instances of third-party libraries, tools, etc. that your package relies on.

The binaries built from your project are something else entirely, and should be treated as different sorts of artifacts. If you want an easy-to-test downloadable archive, adapt your build process to provide that as a target: it should build the code, and then compress the source and built binary into the desired single file.

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Binary files that are related or required by the project must be included in version-control, they can be tracked. The only thing that version control can't do with binary files is compare and merge.