Cheap Branching Anywhere

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Tue, 2006-06-06 at 07:12 +0200, Matthieu Moy wrote:

> In bzr, you have two distinct notions to keep the history of a
> project: The "repository" contains a set of revisions, each revision
> being identified with a unique revision-id, and stored in a
> delta-compressed manner. Ancestry is also stored here, so you have a
> DAG of revisions.
> 
> Then you have the notion of branch. Each branch is a sequence of
> revisions, but in the branch, you only need to keep the revision-id,
> not the complete information that bzr will find in the repository.

Over the weekend, we discussed adding to Mercurial the ability to couple
multiple working directories to a single repository, which would give us
the same functionality as bzr in this respect.  This is something that
would be implemented as an extension, to keep the core simple.

It should be very easy to do; maybe 15 minutes to get the basic
functionality working, and some more time to make sure it's completely
clean.

	<b