[issue458] hardlink metadata of repos not directly cloned

[Pierre THIERRY]

New submission from Pierre THIERRY <nowhere.man at levallois.eu.org>:

When cloning several remote repos that were themselves cloned from a common
remote repo, they are stored totally separately on the local FS, though they
sometimes share a great part of their history.

Would it be possible to hardlink their common metadata?

A use case would be the following, assuming the command is unify, and takes
repos paths as arguments:

$ hg clone http://selenic.com/repo/hg main
$ hg clone http://hg.intevation.org/mercurial/crew
$ hg clone http://oss.oracle.com/mercurial/mason/punch
$ hg clone http://oss.oracle.com/mercurial/mason/mpatch
$ hg unify main crew punch mpatch

When cloning an important number of similar repos, that could vastly reduce the
amount of space taken, though I don't knwo if this operation can be made to be
safe (i.e. not having the ability to corrupt of repo).

----------
messages: 2556
nosy: nowhereman
priority: wish
status: unread
title: hardlink metadata of repos not directly cloned

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Mercurial issue tracker <mercurial-bugs at selenic.com>
<http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/bts/issue458>
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