Mercurial 2.0 adds large binary file support

Mercurial, the distributed revision control tool, has recieved a feature update to version 2.0; this adds a new graft command and a largefiles extension. Every five months, the Mercurial developers release a feature update of the software; in July, version 1.9 added a new filesets language.

The additions to version 2.0 include the graft command which allows individual changes to be copied from other branches without merging those branches; this should make backporting changes between branches easier. The largefiles extension addresses large binary files which tend not to be very compressable, not amenable to being diffed and are not mergable. The extension improves handling of these files by moving them to a central store and only fetching them from the store when needed.

The release also includes changes to commit, which now aborts when there are uncommitted sub-repositories, help, which now has usage examples for most commands, and import, which offers an --edit switch. Further details on the changes and bug fixes can be found in the What's New entry. Mercurial is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, AIX and BSD or as source, licensed under the GPLv2.

(djwm)