git and svn subrepos

Augie Fackler durin42 at gmail.com
Tue Jan 12 07:47:10 CST 2010


On Jan 12, 2010, at 12:35 AM, Matt Joiner wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I'd like to know the future roadmap for supporting subrepos of the  
> Subversion persuasion. In my/our usage of VCS, externals play a  
> heavy role in keeping repository and working copy sizes down, and  
> maintaining internal builds and versioning of thirdparty libraries  
> and the like for use by various projects. I've been watching http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/subrepos#To_Do 
>  with great interest since around the time of the 1.3 release.
>
> I've made two observations with regards to the ability to support  
> the "svn:externals" style subrepos:
> Firstly that svn does versioning, and "basing" on a per directory  
> level, which evidently is not possible in hg. Two possible working  
> arounds would be:
> To do something akin to "chroot" when updating;
> or maintaining all the directories that one might pick out as  
> svn:external targets as different branches and selecting that branch;
> both of which require keeping the entire hg log history locally for  
> each checkout, and furthermore does not version directories at all.
I'm not sure what this has to do with subrepos? Are you wanting to  
include a subdirectory of a Mercurial repository?

> And that secondly, external directories picked from various external  
> repositories, will each require a full hg history folder in the  
> base, destroying the first advantage I listed above. Working copy  
> sizes could become potentially immense, or repository management  
> very complex in trying to juggle library versions etc.
I'm not sure quite what you're asking here either, but in my  
experience an entire hgsubversion clone (with working copy) is often  
smaller than a single svn working copy.
> The above observations are of hg repos externaled from an svn  
> working copy (and I expect git within hg, and git within svn to be  
> the same), the reverse case (svn within hg) is somewhat simpler and  
> requires some intimacy with the Subversion bindings.

Last I knew, svn:externals had no mechanism for supporting non- 
Subversion VCSes as sources for the externals. That's a feature you'd  
have to talk to them about.

> Are there any plans, or considerations being made for adding the  
> ability to link to svn externals from within hg, and has any  
> discussion occurred regarding providing features to ease the use of  
> hg repos within svn checkouts?

As of about 2 weeks ago, subrepos has svn support, which will be in  
the next release (1.5), which should be available around the beginning  
of March.

>
> Regards,
> Matt Joiner.
> _______________________________________________
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> Mercurial at selenic.com
> http://selenic.com/mailman/listinfo/mercurial

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