Converting big files

[Greg Ward]

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Benjamin Pollack
<benjamin at bitquabit.com> wrote:
> One thing in this particular case is that there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to losslessly round-trip from Mercurial to bfiles and back and end up with an identical repository.  The only thing the bfiles converter does is change where (some of) the actual file bits are stored; everything else stays the same.  This means that I'd like a system where it's theoretically possible to run a not-yet-written "hg bfunconvert" command after "hg bfconvert" and end up with the original repository.  Extending the convert machinery, for the reasons Dirkjan points out, would make that impossible, whereas a custom solution would make it easy.  While we could modify the convert extension for this use case, that reëmphasizes the weakness of extending convert in the first place: extending an extension is brittle.

Ooh, crap, I didn't realize that 'hg convert' made that impossible --
I guess the fact that it mangles tag history is the killer problem?  I
guess that tears it: bfiles conversion has to be separate from regular
conversion.  (For now.  Maybe someday the convert extension will be
better behaved in this regard.)

So, I'll try to take a look at Paul's patch soon.

Greg