Managing large external dependencies using mercurial

Question

I am working on a project which makes use of several large 3rd party libraries such as boost, tbb and ACE. I would like to control exactly which versions of these 3rd party libraries are used in my project rather than rely on whatever is available in the build machine. I have done this sort of thing in the past by adding these libraries to my projects repository. This works fine but it does slow mercurial down forcing it to track a couple orders of magnitude more files than what my project contains. Is there a better to way to manage external dependencies?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

If you can find Mercurial, git, or svn repos for those libraries, you can make them subrepositories of your project. Subrepos don't point to a repo in general, but rather point to a specific version of a specfiic repo, so it meets your goal on that.