Mercurial with big binary files

Greg Ward greg-hg at gerg.ca
Fri Jul 3 14:00:58 CDT 2009


On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 12:33 AM, Craig
McQueen<mcqueen-c at edsrd1.yzk.co.jp> wrote:
> At the moment I see a couple of issues to stop us using Mercurial or other
> DVCS:
[...]
> 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?

Mercurial lags the competition for this use case, unfortunately.  git
supports shallow clones, and Bazaar has the notion of "checkouts" --
which are essentially the shallowest clones of all, aka centralized
version control.  I haven't been paying attention to Bazaar lately (I
joked to some colleagues the other day that they change file formats
every month... then I went and read the released notes for 1.16, which
is indeed the third file format change in three months!), but I know
they've been working hard on performance.  It's probably worth looking
into for your usage pattern.

Greg


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