redirected and shared working trees

[Denys Duchier]

I don't know if this is a completely foolish idea, but since we are soon going
to decouple branches and repositories, I got to thinking that it could sometimes
be pretty convenient to be able to decouple a branch and its working tree.

For example, I have a specially hacked version of Gentoo's etc-update that
implies two files:

	/usr/lib/portage/bin/etc-update
        /etc/etc-update.conf

I was thinking that it would be really nice if I could maintain my branch for
these 2 files in:

	/home/duchier/gentoo/etc-update

but have the working directory associated with this branch be /.  Thus, my
gentoo/etc-update branch would have an inventory with:

	usr
        usr/lib
        usr/lib/portage
        usr/lib/portage/bin
        usr/lib/portage/bin/etc-update
        etc
        etc/etc-update.conf

Other branches could track other system files.  The idea of nested trees would
not work here due to overlapping, but sharing the working tree would seem to do
nicely.

Is this too wacky?

Cheers,

--Denys