FUD about files over 10MB

[Greg Ward]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 6:39 AM, Martin Geisler <mg at lazybytes.net> wrote:
> I would like to make the warning we give when adding large files more
> precise. Right now you're told:

+1

> Hence, I would like to tell the user *that* instead of only hinting at
> some unspecified problems. Something like
>
>  large.jpg: you will now need at least 30 MB of RAM to work with this repository
>
> Perhaps it would be good to explictly mention that the file is large,
> otherwise the warning may seem to come out of the blue? I just don't
> know how to formulate this in a brief way.

Hmmm.  Screwing on my thinking cap, I come up with

  large.jpg: large files increase Mercurial's memory consumption; you
will need at least 30 MB of RAM to work with this repository (use 'hg
revert large.jpg' to un-add this file)

Perhaps "hg help add" should give a little more detail, e.g.

  Note that Mercurial's memory use is proportional to the size
  of the files it tracks, so adding large files will cause Mercurial
  to use large amounts of memory for most future operations
  involving this repository.  See <...>

where <...> is a link to the to-be-written Mercurial wiki page that
describes this problem, and the workarounds, in great detail.  (IOW,
leave out the link for now.  Your patch makes things better now, so
let's get it in, *maybe* with the above paragraph added to the help.)

Greg