How many flags are in filelog.flags() allowed?

[Klaus Koch]

Hello, 

The manifest format allows several chars for file flags according to parse_manifest in parsers.c.

Consequently almost all calls of manifest.flags and context.flags ask whether some flag is in the result, like
'x' in files.flags(f).  On the other hand, in mercurial.commands.manifest and mercurial.patch.diff the result is used as key for a dictionary where just one char is defined: gitmode[man1.flags(a)].

So I wonder whether it is allowed to add additional flags, or if only the flags '', 'l', and 'x' are allowed?


The reason why I am asking:
At our company we would like to use Mercurial for repositories containing big files (ca. 0.5-1TiB all files together).

I have implemented an extension for handling such files by a simple wrapping of the dirstate.flagfunc to add a flag 'S' for files which are too big or match a certain file pattern.  Files which such a flag are then stored centrally.

Other solutions like BFiles and BigFiles do not scale for us, because they generate ignore patterns which take several seconds to generate (we have several hundreds of such files in our repo).  Putting those files outside the repo/working dir does not work either, because they are either input data or their production requires several hours or days.

Thanks,
Klaus