Google Summer of Code & Partial cloning

[Eric M. Hopper]

On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 20:09 +0200, Frédéric wrote:
> On http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/PartialClone I
> read :
> "Proposal: add a new file like .hgignore to the .hg/ directory that
> specifies which files should be ignored for clone/checkout."
> 
> Why not to specify only the subdir that is cloned instead of
> specifying all the files to ignore ?

I'm reminded of Perforce's ability to sort of mix and max directories to
create your own custom checkout image.  Perforce uses a set of
statements that specify the mapping between the working directory
structure and repository directory structure.

I'm just throwing that out there as an idea.  I'm not sure if that level
of complexity in Mercurial is wise.  And I found that feature of
Perforce to be very confusing when I first encountered it.

Though one thing you could do with that then is to have a versioned file
that contained a bunch of configurations for various 'views' of the
repository if you wanted to work on some particular area.

But I agree with you, I don't like the ignore idea.  If you clone just a
subdirectory you probably don't want all the useless directory
components, and it would be really irritating to have to write all kinds
of special cases to deal with what happens when people try to do things
outside the directory they cloned.

-- 
A word is nothing more or less than the series of historical
connotations given to it. That's HOW we derive meaning, and to claim
that there is an arbitrary meaning of words above and beyond the way
people use them is a blatant misunderstanding of the nature of language.
-- Anonymous blogger
-- Eric Hopper
(hopper at omnifarious.org http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper)--
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