Out of Memory a bridge too far

[Jason Earl]

On Sat, Nov 12 2011, Chris Hecker wrote:

>>> What I am actually looking for (I believe) is something along the
>>> lines of the new largefile support in Mercurial.
>> Yes, we are interested in both helping you write it, and in getting
>> it merged in to core.
>
> My fear about doing a hacky "external largefile solution" like in hg
> is that it will be "good enough" and relieve any pressure to solve the
> real problem, but it's really a quite crappy solution to the actual
> problem.  Solving it the right way seems like it would be only a
> little more work (once you take into account testing and everything
> over the lifetime), yet it would set bzr up to be a real "dvcs 2.0"
> project, leaving the hacks behind.

I have played a little with the Mercurial solution, and it seems to
solve my problems precisely.  I have large PNG files that I want to be
able to store in the repository.  I then want to be able to run pngcrush
on them and still be able to commit.  To be honest, the one drawback of
the Mercurial solution is that I am wary about not having all of the old
large files in my local tree.  I am not worried about disk space, but I
am worried about having the files I need on my local computer when I
need them.  To be honest, I am also worried about having to start to
back up the central branch.

I don't want bzr to try and merge these large binary files.  I just want
bzr to not lose any copies, and I don't want to have to manage them
outside of Bazaar.

If I did not like the bzr UI so much better, and if I was not curious
about whether I could actually hack Bazaar, I probably would just use
Mercurial and be done with it.  As far as I can see it basically does
the right thing in all of my use cases.

Of course, I did not push it too hard.  Maybe there is something I am
missing.

Jason