Why don't you keep the .idea folder in SVN?

And after that someone will ask for eclipse project files, then netbeans, then eric, then... well, you know ;)

@Hernani - I thought you guys were all developing with PyCharm anyway... anyways, can you post that as an answer? I'd really like all questions here to have a good answer.

That is not really an answer, its more along the lines of a silly comment. And most of us use intellij idea, not pycharm, which is a commercial product. Anyway, that best practices link is for internal projects I believe, some open source projects "bundle" with a project files for some IDE, but usually a free one.

@Hernani - well, it's my philoesophy that even on open source projects, it's beneficial to include these kinds of files, even if just for one/two common IDEs, especially since you're already using it and it's not extra work.

Wait, I thought that PyCharm IS IntelliJ-idea-for-python. How do you use IntelliJ with a python project?

BTW, I'm not trying to challenge your decision on this, just asking for some explanation/motivation behind your decision - you did provide some of that in your comment, this is why I suggested you turn it into an answer.

PyCharm is a stripped down version of intellij I believe. It uses the python module for intellij and version control support, etc. But is basically intellij I think. Dunno if it has any advantage over pure intellij, but since we mostly work with java, makes some sense to use the same IDE for everything.

Anyway, don't call this my decision, because it isn't, everything I said so far is only an opinion. In fact, I don't think there is a decision about this, we never discussed it. I agrre that is always a cool thing to have, but personally, I'm not very keen on that. I may have some custom stuff in some project I checked out from somewhere, and would not be very happy to see that overridden after a svn update.

Anyway, this is just an opinion, not a definitive answer, so I believe this shouldn't be considered an answer :) Anyway, feel free to use my words to build an answer, if any of what I said makes sense.