Repository collection practices

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 23:58 +0100, Mark White wrote:

> I guess for when you want to track (atomic) versions across
> a wider tree than is convenient for branching.  The obvious
> reason is size: for something like pkgsrc or FreeBSD ports
> (as Sanjoy mentioned), it's important to be able to get a
> coherent version of everything at once, but you probably
> don't want to branch the whole tree just to experiment with
> one package.

Benoit has a patch that lets you associate multiple working directories
with a single repository, which partly addresses this problem.  Couple
that with the much-desired support for partial checkouts ("I only want
to check out *this* hunk of the tree"), and you've got something that
will, I think, work quite well for small experiments on large trees.

>   I suppose this could even be true with just
> two or three big, interdependent packages, which you want to
> version together but be able to branch separately.

A common way to deal with that is to package them separately but use
some other mechanism to tie them together.  This is what Subversion's
externals property is for, as an example.  Someone posted a patch the
other day that implements this in some fashion for Mercurial, though
I've not had time to look at it.

	<b