On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 1:21 PM, Talden  wrote:
> Does anyone know of an intention to deliver an equivalent to the
> Subversion 'copy' command.
>
> A recent reorganisation of our project content presented a number of
> cases where content was split up and both new files contain most of
> the original (that is a copy and a modify).  The original file was
> also modified and kept as the template.  Modifications here account
> for a tiny amount of content yet without a cheap copy we have added a
> couple of tens of MBs in content to history.
>
> Avoiding this redundant growth in the history seems a no-brainer goal
> for a DVCS (though possibly not trivial to implement - I don't know
> the underlying structures of the repo).  Additionally, it would be
> nice for merges of branches taken earlier than this reorganisation to
> propagate changes through to these derived files to offer candidate
> content to merge (these might justifiably be considered conflicts)...

We have discussed that and would like to add it for merge tracking.
If you look around more you should find something on the wiki or list
archive.

I believe Robert's group-compress format (still experimental) will
automatically compress similar text across different files.