Updating Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

[Greg Ward]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Na'Tosha Bard <natosha at gmail.com> wrote:
> Another thought that has occurred to me.  Since we are aiming for
> largefiles' inclusion into Mercurial 2.0 in November, and we are aiming to
> complete the book for the 2.1 release in March, should we consider a section
> regarding largefiles in the hgbook?

Sounds like a good idea to me.

> I'd propose that we omit the low-level technical gunk and simply describe
> largefiles from a high-level, end user perspective, as well as provide clear
> steps for what should be necessary to get a repo up and running with
> largefiles.

But I *like* low-level technical gunk! ;-)

Seriously: I don't think we need to explain exactly why revlog doesn't
work so well with compressed or encrypted data, but it could be useful
to spend a paragraph explaining why DVCS and large incompressible
files don't work so well together.

(Hmmm: it would be interesting to do some synthetic tests with putting
large incompressible files into base Mercurial, git, and bzr and see
what the impact is. When I was converting our CVS repo at work to hg
originally, the first couple of attempts produced a 900 MB repo,
around 25% of which was the history of one single file -- a 30 MB PDF
that changes fairly frequently. Hence bfiles.)

Greg