Some customization projects require vendor-provided boxed software to be installed as a platform. The custom development then consists of creating scripts or development of plug-ins.The required software packages can easily amount to several gigabytes in size.I'd like to have all 1st and 3rd party dependencies for a project in a central location. In the end, this means I'd end up putting very large ZIP archives into an artifact repository manager like Nexus, in addition to the custom-developed artifacts.Is this a good idea? Are there other established practices on where to store vendor-provided software packages - apart from the usual network share?
Where do you store vendor software images?
dependency management
In my experience the two possibilities you mentioned (a network share or an artifact server) are common. Serving gigabyte-sized files is not a big deal.Perhaps you might consider what specific functionality you need, in order to choose a method of storing and distributing this software:Permissions: Can you control who has read and write access?Versioning: Do you need to store multiple versions?Metadata: Do you want to store any extra information alongside the files?Discoverability: Should it be easy to find the files? Do you want to be able to search for the files?Automation: How easy is it to automate download/installation?