[new-extension] hg breakout

[Guido Ostkamp]

Hello,

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007, Essien Ita Essien wrote:
> Finally, reviews please... anything i'm obviously (or not so obviously) 
> doing wrong?
>
> Is this something that people find usefull? Is it something that would 
> probably find itself one day (ohh... the wild dreams) upstream?

I checked out your extension.

The README, 'hg help' output (without args) contained lines with > 80 
characters which does not display well. These should be wrapped to stay 
below 80 characters.

In the README I missed hints on how to activate the extension, e.g. which 
entry to add in .hgrc etc.

The command names should be easy to understand, but aren't. So perhaps, it 
would be better to have a 'hg breakout' command and then some mandatory 
additional parameter (giving e.g. 'hg breakout copy') instead of things 
like 'bo-copy' etc.

When I tried to 'bo-copy' (your first example) I found the working 
directory to be as expected, however the internal '.hg' still included the 
complete history of all files out of scope.

This means, if you break a 1 GB repository (consider size without working 
copy) with 10 directories with approx. balanced number of changes into 10 
repositories with your tool, you won't get 10 * 100 MB repositories as 
expected, but 10 * 1 GB repositories.

To be useful, I would have expected that your extension scans the old 
repositories changesets to generate new changesets in the new repository 
that contain just changes to files in the selected directory, possibly by 
replaying those changes.

I'm sorry if my comments are a bit disappointing for you. I'm just a user, 
not a Mercurial developer and it could be that others think differently 
about the matter.

Regards

Guido