Repository collection practices

[TK Soh]

On 6/27/06, Mark White <mark at celos.net> wrote:
> Bryan O'Sullivan writes:
> > 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.
>
> Sure: sounds like a useful approach.  Though looking at the
> patch I guess this would mean several [maybe partial]
> working trees committing to the same repository, rather than
> a Mercurial branch in the normal sense?

To me, the patch just mimic CVS's central repo support, which is
useful if you just want to check out a sort of real-only working copy,
without having to clone the .hg directory, which save diskspace when
cloning across file systems. But you lose the ability to local
commits.

> I suppose it'd be fairly easy to share common revlog files
> directly (rather than with hardlinks), then make real copies
> for local commits as needed, if the speed of making the
> linkfarm turned out to be limiting with a large tree.

This is really what I really wanted to see. IMO, the CVS-liked
central-repo support is a just a trade-off for those who have yet to
fully understand, or too worry to embrace, the distributed way.

Having able to do local commits without the need to slurp the whole
.hg directory is going to do my soul a lot of good ;-)