Largefiles allows for tracking large, incompressible binary files in Mercurial

without requiring excessive bandwidth for clones and pulls.  Files added as

largefiles are not tracked directly by Mercurial; rather, their revisions are

identified by a checksum, and Mercurial tracks these checksums.  This way, when

you clone a repository or pull in changesets, the large files in older

revisions of the repository are not needed, and only the ones needed to update

to the current version are downloaded.  This saves both disk space and

bandwidth.

If you are starting a new repository or adding new large binary files, using

largefiles for them is as easy as adding '--large' to your hg add command.  For

example:

$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=thisfileislarge count=2000

$ hg add --large thisfileislarge

$ hg commit -m 'add thisfileislarge, which is large, as a largefile'

When you push a changeset that affects largefiles to a remote repository, its

largefile revisions will be uploaded along with it.  Note that the remote

Mercurial must also have the largefiles extension enabled for this to work.

When you pull a changeset that affects largefiles from a remote repository,

nothing different from Mercurial's normal behavior happens.  However, when you

update to such a revision, any largefiles needed by that revision are

downloaded and cached if they have never been downloaded before.  This means

that network access is required to update to revision you have not yet updated

to.

If you already have large files tracked by Mercurial without the largefiles

extension, you will need to convert your repository in order to benefit from

largefiles.  This is done with the 'hg lfconvert' command:

$ hg lfconvert --size 10 oldrepo newrepo

By default, in repositories that already have largefiles in them, any new file

over 10MB will automatically be added as largefiles.  To change this

threshhold, set [largefiles].size in your Mercurial config file to the minimum

size in megabytes to track as a largefile, or use the --lfsize option to the

add command (also in megabytes):

[largefiles]

size = 2

$ hg add --lfsize 2

The [largefiles].patterns config option allows you to specify specific

space-separated filename patterns (in shell glob syntax) that should always be

tracked as largefiles:

[largefiles]

pattens = *.jpg *.{png,bmp} library.zip content/audio/*