two factors for switching to Mercurial

[Bill Barry]

dvd at newfoundmarket.com wrote:
> Hello:
>
> I have been testing Mercurial and it is a great software
> that has advantages over other packages I have used.
> The only two factors that would make hesitant to completely
> switch to Mercurial are
>
> 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.
>
Why can't you do this:
create a file in the root of your repository called .emptydirs
create a hook that runs on incoming changes which creates the 
directories listed in .emptydirs

Perhaps at some point such a solution could be enhanced with a tool that 
automatically finds empty directories and updates this file (ignoring 
empty dirs that are in .hgignore).

> Can it be eventually enhanced to support empty directory by
> using some command switch? such as  hg --include-empty
> or it can not be done due to design requirement ?
>
> 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.  something like
Why would someone ever want this?
The .hg directory is not that much different than the .svn folders that 
litter svn checkouts (with exception to the fact that the .hg dir stores 
all revisions and the .svn counterpart only stores the current parent 
revision).