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I understand that in mercurial you can never remove a history for a file unless you do something like this. Is there any way to disable history for certain files from ever being created?. If any other repository system is capable of doing that, please put that down as well.

Why would I want that? Well, in our build system, new binaries are constantly being committed which the non-programmers can use to run the program without compiling every time (the compilation is done by the build system). Each time new binaries are committed, the old ones are useless as far as we are concerned. It is unnecessarily taking up space. If the new binary messes up by any chance, we can always revert back to older source and rebuild (assuming there is a way to disable history for specific files).

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Samaursa
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    I think the issue here is that *non-programmers* have to work with *programmer* resources, i.e. the version control system. Why don't you host binaries separately? – Oben Sonne Jun 23 '11 at 19:12
  • @Oben: That is something we may end up doing, but would require a lot of changes/time. – Samaursa Jun 23 '11 at 19:14

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As you found out, you cannot do what you want directly in Mercurial.

I suggest you put the binaries somewhere else -- a Subversion subrepo would be a good choice. That way you will only download the latest version of each file on the client, but you will have all versions on your server (where it should be easy to add more disk space).

Martin Geisler
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