Mercurial with big binary files

Craig McQueen mcqueen-c at edsrd1.yzk.co.jp
Thu Jul 2 23:33:46 CDT 2009


G'day folks,

I've looked into Mercurial to see if it would suit my company's needs. 
Currently we're using Subversion and it serves us well, but it's 
starting to look a bit difficult to support projects that involve teams 
in different countries. So DVCS are worth considering.

At the moment I see a couple of issues to stop us using Mercurial or 
other DVCS:

1) Non-mergable files. We store Word docs, Excel docs, LabVIEW VIs, and 
other comparable proprietary files. It seems that Word is mergable in 
theory (though Mercurial does not support it out-of-the-box), and 
LabVIEW VIs are too, apparently, if you buy their most expensive 
license. But we'll inevitably find we have files that are non-mergable. 
In Subversion we deal with this using svn:needs-lock and that's fine. 
Are there any solutions in a DVCS? Any possibility of setting up a 
"compromise" system which is mostly distributed, but for non-mergable 
files it refers to a central lock server? I guess the "right" solution 
is to develop a merge tool for each of these non-mergable file types, 
but there are always going to be file types that have no merge tool.

2) Size of repository. We put just about all development files in 
Subversion, and that can include large images. We have a repo that is 
probably 4 GB in size. It strongly suggests a "shallow clone" type 
strategy. Is such a feature likely to become a core feature or standard 
extension in Mercurial in the near/medium future?

So I guess my question is, should I hope that Mercurial can suit our 
needs sometime in the near/medium future, or give up now and stick to a 
centralised VCS?

Regards,
Craig McQueen

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