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I'm wondering: how does it handle large binary files? Any better than git or hg without extensions?

Yes. Binaries are handled by one or more servers, we call them BAM servers. The servers hold the data and your repo holds the meta data, binaries are fetched on demand.

You can have a cloud of servers so the binaries are "close" (think China, India, US).

Two questions:

It is unclear to me if the BAM server is part of this opensourcing or not. The page talks about a 90-day trial.

Also, it is common in other (usually non-D)VCS workflows to lock binary files while working on them, since concurrent changes can't be merged the way text files allow. Does BK support anything like this?

We open sourced everything. So yes, it's there. The commercial site is out of date.

We have not done the centralized lock manager, we didn't get commercial demand for that (yeah, surprised me too). We could do it though, it's not that hard.

Thank you!

The BAM server is part of the open source version. The 90-day trial is for the enterprise version (which is the same version, only with commercial support).

BitKeeper doesn't support locking binary files.

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