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Note: I've tried searching, Stackoverflows near useless. I am not sure what kind of tool I need.

At my organization we need to keep track of the software configuration for many types of computers including the binary installers and automation scripts. Change is infrequent but the size of latest version of the configuration is several gigs.

We are trying to use Mercurial to store changes but it is just too slow, even without many revisions at all. I did an hg status but killed it after it took 10 minutes without finishing.

We are looking for a way to store the current configuration as well as having the old configurations there just in case. I have never done anything like this before and do not know what tools are available or even suitable for such tasks. Can someone point me in the right direction or tell me how the are solving this problem? Thanks

Mark Stahler
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Since hard disk space is cheap and being able to view binary differences isn't very helpful, perhaps the best option you have is to store each configuration in a new directory that is indexed somehow. Example below:

/software/configs/2009-03-15
/software/configs/2009-09-28
/software/configs/2009-09-30

Given the size of your files and the infrequent number of changes, this would allow you to pick a configuration from a given 'tag' without the overhead of revision control.

If you pack your files into a single tar file and generate a SHA-512 hash, then you can be reasonably sure that no one has tampered with your files since they were archived.

Will Bickford
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While I don't know specific details about how to implement this strategy in mercurial, I have been working with git and git-fat. It sets up a general procedure that is likely to be feasible on mercurial as well. Basically the idea is whenever you add a binary file to the repository, under the hood, the repo creates a symlink to the file that is actually stored in another location as a checksummed object.

This allows large files to be tracked by the repo, without storing the actual data inside. It requires the data to be stored in some other location (perhaps in a binary management system).

It might take some configuration to do it in mercurial, but I think it's an elegantly simple solution.

NotsoDarkMatters
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