Cloning locally a repo with subrepos using ../ in .hgsub

[Mike Williams]

Hi

I am investigating the use of sub-repos to share different subsets of a 
collection of libraries amongst many projects.  This approach has been 
mentioned in other mailings to this list so I don't believe it is an 
oddball requirement.

So, I have created repos of the libraries at the same level as the 
projects on the server, and then in each project reference the sub-repos 
for the libraries in the .hgsub files as:

libname = ../libname

As expected this is all working fine when for creating clones from the 
server.  The pain has started with creating local clones from the clone 
created from the server - the relative paths no longer hold on the local 
machine.  The aim is to follow the typical hg workflow of having a clean 
clones to exchange changesets with the master repos, and local clones to 
work on.

Adding the subpaths extension and with a minimal .hg/subpaths file 
containing(*)

[subpaths]
../(.*) = \1

I can then clone locally from the master repo clone and everything looks 
good until I want to interact with the master repos from the original 
clone.  The simple solution is to rename/move .hg/subpaths somewhere 
else for the duration of the interactions and then move it back when 
working locally.

There are two issues here I would like suggestions about:

1) Is there a better parent/sub-repo structure to represent this many 
projects/many libraries structure on the server?  We have 10s of 
projects and 100s of libraries with no reasonable project to "own" a set 
of the libraries such that the normally recommended .hgsub entry of 
libname = libname becomes usable.

2) There does seem to be an idiom here to convert a server's flat 
sub-repo structure to a hierarchy locally.  Should this be rolled into 
mercurial of the subpath extension, possibly just to remove leading ../ 
from .hgsub entries?  This would be global command option (--internal?) 
so it doesn't change any existing behaviour.

Yes there is a downside with this in that no one is reproducing the repo 
structure of the server, which makes rebuilding it after an outage an 
interesting activity in its own right - perhaps a server repo with all 
the repos being served as sub-repos of it.  But this is disappearing up 
another line of thought so I will stop now.

TTFN

(*) A little bit of experience from experimenting with the subpaths 
extension.  The subpath is (currently) as it appears in .hgsub and not 
normalised in anyway.  If you have mixture of Windows and unix path 
separators present then you will need an entry of:

..(\\|/)(.*) = \2

-- 
Mike