Mercurial (Hg) and Binary Files

I am writing a set of django apps and would like to use Hg for version control. I would like each app to be independent of the others so in each app there may be a directory for static media that contains images that I would not want under version control. In other words, the binary files would not all be in one central location

I would like to find a way to clone the repository that would include copies of the image files. It also would be great if when I did a merge, if there were an image file in one repo and not another, that there would be some sort of w开发者_如何学编程arning.

Currently I use a python script to find images and other binary files that are in one repo, but not the other. But a lot of people must face this problem, so there must be a more robust and elegant solution.

One one other thing...for reasons I do not want to go into, usually one of my repos is on a windows machine, and the other is on Linux. So a crossplatform solution would be nice.

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Since Mercurial 2.0 the extension largefiles is now included in the main distribution. That extension keeps and manages large files outside of the "normal" repository in a way that you get the benefit of DCVS but without the benefit of exponential size and processing time growth.

Other extension that work along similar lines are SnapExtension and BigFilesExtension. However, those two are not distributed with Mercurial (you have to get them manually).

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Mercurial can track any kind of file, for binary files if something changes then the whole file gets replaced not just the changes.

On the getting a warning if one repo doesn't contain a file, that's kind of the point of a DVCS is that the repos are related but are autonomous. You could always check and see what files were added during a synch or merge operation.

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The current Mercurial book (by Bryan O'Sullivan) says, that Mercurial stores diffs also for binary files. How efficient this is, obviously depends on the nature of changes to binary files.