[RFC] kbfiles: an extension to track binary files with less wasted bandwidth

[Na'Tosha Bard]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 9:10 PM, Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com>wrote:

> On 2011-07-26 20:23, Andrew Pritchard wrote:
> > We are still in the process of cleaning up the code to ship with
> Mercurial, but
> > the current status can be seen at
> > http://developers.kilnhg.com/Repo/Kiln/Group/Unstable/Files.  Before the
> 'real'
> > pull request, we will collapse it into a single patch in the hgext
> directory.
> > Planned changes before then include removing compatibility shims for old
> > versions of Mercurial and some minor rebranding to remove mentions of
> 'Kiln'
> > from the code and repository layout.
> >
> > We would prefer to avoid renaming the extension if possible, both to
> avoid
> > adding extra code to handle both old repositories and new ones and to
> reflect
> > the heritage of the extension, but we understand that parts of the
> Mercurial
> > community may be opposed to the name 'kbfiles', and as such we are
> willing to
> > rename to 'terafiles' if the name would otherwise block the extension
> from
> > shipping with Mercurial.
>
> We got a request to support kbfiles in the TortoiseHg shell extension
> (for Windows). I was a bit worried about seeing file paths like
> ".hg/kilnbfiles/dirstate" (see function openbfdirstate in
> kbfiles/bfutil.py).
>
> People may call me paranoid, but the reason why I'm a bit worried is
> that the name "Kiln" is a registered trademark by FogCreek [1]. I do not
> expect that they would ever forbid anyone using this name, but in theory
> they could.
>
> Frankly, I'd prefer not giving any company whatsoever the ability to
> "pull the plug" on anything related to Mercurial.
>
> [1] Registration number 3869331, United States Patent and Trademark
> Office (see uspto.gov)
>

My team uses kbfiles heavily and would like to see the extension shipped
with mercurial as well.

Regarding the name, I recall a discussion at the 1.9 sprint that suggested
"HugeFiles" would be a good alternative name (I recall discussing this with
Benjamin offlist, but I don't know what conclusion you guys came to on your
end about it).  I started some work to do the renaming on my end to submit
upstream as a patch, but discovered Kiln has some problems when it doesn't
see a "kbfiles" extension enabled client-side, so I never got around to
finishing it.  I can understand the concern Adrian has regarding FogCreek
having a trademark on Kiln, and also I recall some people thinking "kbfiles"
was a bit weird because it makes the user think of "kilobyte files" or
"files in the size of kilobytes", which clearly do not need such an
extension for usage in Mercurial.

Personally, I think "terafiles" also sounds quite strange, especially since
it seems likely that people familiar with the family of bfile-related
extensions will inadvertently say "tbfiles" :-)

Cheers,
Na'Tosha
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