two factors for switching to Mercurial

[Martin Geisler]

dvd at newfoundmarket.com writes:

Hi

> 1.  lack of support for empty directory. I saw workarounds such as
> creating hidden files. But these might not work well when
> unpredictable number/depth of empty directories are required for
> other applications to function correctly. [...]

Mercurial does not version control directories -- I don't really know
why, though.

If other tools require the empty directories to be present, could you
not just change them to make the directories themselves as needed?

> 2.  The repository has to be local. i.e.  ".hg" must be in the same
> parent directory.  It would help a lot sometimes if the content
> under ".hg" could be specified to be located a on a different host 
> or directory. [...]


The basic idea of a *distributed* revision control system is that
everybody keeps their repositories local.

If it is because you want to keep a repository in some known public
place, then simply put it there but make a local clone for your work.
The advantage of a local clone is that everything is very fast.

If you want to link the .hg directory to somewhere else is because the
history is too big for you to checkout, then that is called a "shallow
clone" and there is some info about that here:

  http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/ShallowClone

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multi-Party Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.