Retaining partial history in local clients

David Baum dbaum at google.com
Wed Jun 25 08:50:06 CDT 2008


I have been experimenting with Mercurial and it looks like a great DVCS
system.  One thing that concerns me, however, is what happens when a large
project accumulates a significant amount of history.  If some of this
history is binary files that don't diff well, then I can see the repository
getting quite large.  I understand that some copies of the repository will
always want to keep full history, but does that mean that every user also
has to carry around a copy of everything?

What if you want to prune your local repository down to one branch?  I know
you can create a new repo and pull that one branch from the old repo, but is
there a way that doesn't require 2x disk space while operating?

What about getting rid of old history?  Let's say I only care about the last
90 days of changesets for a project that has been under constant evolution
for 2 years.  Is there some way to prune my local repo to only have the last
90 days of changes?

For smaller projects none of this matters, but I'm just wondering how well
the Mercurial approach will scale to large projects with many users
contributing over a long period of time.  Specifically, I'm concerned with
how that impacts local user repositories, and not really worried about
central, public repositories (which should be as complete as possible).

Thanks,
Dave
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