Mercurial popularity is stagnant

[Michael McNeil Forbes]

On Jul 1, 2014, at 1:50 PM, Bruce Cran <bruce at cran.org.uk> wrote:
> On 7/1/2014 1:57 PM, Angel Ezquerra wrote:
>> I may be missing something but isn't the git-annex git's equivalent to mercurial's built in largefiles extension?
> Or the 3rd-party BigFiles (http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/BigfilesExtension) or Snap (http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/SnapExtension)?

The big advantage of git-annex is the files can be distributed: you do not need
to have all of the files in a single location.  It keeps track of where the
various files are.  Thus, you can checkout the source repository on your laptop
and the get only a few of the data files associated with a run for analysis.
The killer feature is that git-annex keeps track of where the various files are
located, making sure that you keep at least n reliable copies somewhere, but
not demanding that all of the files be kept anywhere in specific.

As far as I can see, not of the mercurial extensions comes even close to
providing this type of functionality.  (Either all the files need to be
stored on some remote server, or all the files need to be stored locally.)

Michael.