cheap branch with hardlink

[John A Meinel]

William Dode wrote:
> The post about mercurial remind me that something very cool in
> mercurial is to make very cheap branch by using hardlink.
>
> I didn't followed the recent discussions about storagebranch, so i
> wonder if it will be possible to make so cheap branch with bzr ? Maybe
> it is possible now by hand ?
>

cp -al old_branch new_branch
should do just fine.

Most files aren't modified, and those that are, are generally renamed
into place.

Certainly you can give it a shot, and report any bugs that you come
across. I think it is planned to support that sort of thing.

If we switch to them, revfiles would be appended in place, but because
of other design criteria, it should be okay to have extra information in
your tree. I don't know about weaves, but if it changes the whole file,
I'm sure Martin will do it atomically (temp file + rename).

I don't know if there is any plan to have "bzr branch" have some sort of
hard-link flag.

But I think an even cheaper method would be to have a revision pool. So
that if entries are not found in the local directory, they can be looked
up elsewhere.
At least then it wouldn't have to copy all of the
text-store/inventory-store, etc. across.
I think the reason bzr may not support it natively, is that on windows,
you don't necessarily have good hardlink support. (I believe FAT32
doesn't have it, though NTFS has something similar)

John
=:->
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