A Question about bfrefresh

[Greg Ward]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 12:25 AM, Steve Borho <steve at borho.org> wrote:
> Please talk with me about how THG can support bfiles in our status and
> commit tools before changing repo.status() :)  I'm certain we can find
> a way to add knowledge of bfiles at or before you monkey-patch the
> output of the status command.

Hmmm.  I want bfiles to have optional automatic integration with
'status' and 'commit', 'update', and 'push' for the benefit of
command-line users.  I don't want THG users to have any special
abilities that command-line users don't, e.g. automatic commit of
modified big files.  (The same goes for any GUI front end that
supports commit.)

Here's my thinking: if bfiles gets automatic integration right, then
THG might not need to do much to support bfiles.  Big files look just
like regular files.  (Except that 'hg status' would print things like
'B-M' or 'BPC' for big files.  And that is negotiable: if messing with
'status' like that will make lots of people hate me, then I won't do
it.  There's always the 'bfstatus' command if you need to know which
big files are pending upload.)

There is one bfiles operation that I do not think can be done
automatically, which is bfadd.  Everyone has a different idea of what
constitutes "big" -- I say 100 kB, you say 10 MB.  So I suspect THG
(and other GUIs!) will need support for adding new big files.  But
that might be all you need to do, if we get the low-level automatic
integration right.

> There's a lot of interest in TortoiseHg having first rate support of bfiles.

That's great news!

Greg