Status of lfs and lock extensions

[Daniele Benegiamo]

Hi Uwe,

On 2021/01/18 18:00, Uwe Brauer wrote:
>>>> "DB" == Daniele Benegiamo <danielebenegiamo at fastwebnet.it> writes:
> [...]
> 
> On the other hand, where do need it for? I thought of using it for my
> hybrid solution: mercurial + dropbox, but for the moment it was
> necessary.

We work on interactive multimedia software (i.e. video games, 
simulators, VR experiences and similar), and so we commonly work with 
many binary assets, often using proprietary tools and formats (e.g. 
proprietary game engine files, proprietary 3d file formats, and so on). 
 From a production point of view, the most problematic files are the 
"proprietary game engine files" in the "game project": you work on them 
similarly on how you would work with source code in a Visual Studio 
project, but you can edit them only using proprietary tools of the game 
engine. Similarly to source code, multiple persons could try editing the 
same "proprietary game engine files" at the same time, and because they 
can't be merged later, we must absolutely avoid it. Otherwise, we would 
end wasting many many hours of work (not counting the people frustration).

Of course such projects have also a lot of source code, and we would 
really love to work on the source code with Mercurial. We experimented 
with a mixed setup (Mercurial + Subversion), but the end result is not 
practical to be used on a daily basis. At that point, the most promising 
option is to continue using Subversion on such type of projects. But as 
we love Mercurial a lot, we were investigating the option to move 
everything under Mercurial.

This is the reason of the OP :)


> I also have the feeling that this extension is a bit against mercurial's
> philosophy, but that should be judged better by others.

Rather than a philosophical issue, I would consider it a "feature of 
last resort" when you know that some type of files can't be merged for 
sure :)


--
Daniele