Binary file storage similar to Kiln

[Anteru]

Hi Chris,

yeah, that's actually the reason why I'm looking into this at all. I
have a research engine and it already has a bunch of binaries in the
source tree (test textures, other test meshes, binary font files, stuff
like this) and I basically see only two solutions to get it working with
Bazaar:

* Wait for foreign branch support: This would solve it neatly, as I
could just have a subdirectory as a lightweight checkout and everything
is fine. There's a bunch of problems with that approach when it comes to
merging though (how do you merge trees which refer to different versions
of the external branch?)

(Right now, I have a lightweight checkout branch for the binary stuff,
and the workflow sucks.)

* Have Kiln-style binary file support right inside Bazaar: Binary files
are stored along everything else, just the way they are retrieved changes.

Approach two seemed easier to me, and now I just need to figure out how
much work it's going to be.

> I have some notes I've been meaning to post about "requirements" for a
> large binaries feature to be really usable and valuable, but there's
> been a fair amount of talk about it on various lists and wikis and
> whatnot so you should check those out.
Do you have some link?

> The entire game
> industry would switch overnight if this and the nested subtree thing
> were solved well, though.
I bet a bunch of researchers would like that as well, having large test
data in a repository is not uncommon.

> That said, if you do a stop-gap hack as a plugin that works well enough,
> I'll definitely help you test it!  :)  Anything is better than running a
> parallel svn tree for binaries.
That's cool, thanks!

Cheers,
  Anteru