two factors for switching to Mercurial

Martin Geisler mg at daimi.au.dk
Tue Jun 17 02:26:50 CDT 2008


Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> writes:

> On Mon, 2008-06-16 at 11:13 +0200, Martin Geisler wrote:
>> Mercurial does not version control directories -- I don't really
>> know why, though.
>
> It's very simple: almost all directories are implied by the
> existence of files. The main benefit of explicitly tracking
> directories is that you can track empty directories. And that's a
> whole lot of extra complexity to track a whole lot of nothing.

I see, that is a good point for empty directories. Writing code to
manage nothing seem silly :-)

For non-empty directories I can see a potential advantage of being
able to version it: if I rename a directory in my clone and another
guy makes a new file within the directory in his clone (before seeing
the rename), then upon merging the right thing can happen if Mercurial
would track the directory rename.

I have only had to deal with this once, though, and it was of course
no problem for me to manually rename the new file upon merging.

-- 
Martin Geisler

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


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