1 Largefiles allows for tracking large, incompressible binary files in Mercurial

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

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

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

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

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

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

     8 bandwidth.

     9 

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

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

    12 example:

    13 

    14 $ dd if=/dev/urandom of=thisfileislarge count=2000

    15 $ hg add --large thisfileislarge

    16 $ hg commit -m 'add thisfileislarge, which is large, as a largefile'

    17 

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

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

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

    21 

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

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

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

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

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

    27 to.

    28 

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

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

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

    32 

    33 $ hg lfconvert --size 10 oldrepo newrepo

    34 

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

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

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

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

    39 add command (also in megabytes):

    40 

    41 [largefiles]

    42 size = 2

    43 

    44 $ hg add --lfsize 2

    45 

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

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

    48 tracked as largefiles:

    49 

    50 [largefiles]

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