cheap branching across file systems?

[John Arbash Meinel]

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TK Soh wrote:
> On 6/27/06, Wouter van Heyst <larstiq at larstiq.dyndns.org> wrote:
>> TK:
>>
>> I guess what I wanted to ask initially, where did you pick up this
>> 'concept of cheap branching'? If our documentation is not clear, that
>> needs to be fixed.
> 
> Try this thread:
> 
>  http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2006-June/008576.html
> 
> Perhaps I didn't understand it correctly.

That is exactly that we can create cheap branches within a repository,
but only as subdirectories of the repository. The specific comment is
that with repositories, bzr doesn't need hard-links to get the same
space savings.

HG supports hard-linking their branches (though as you make changes to
one, it starts to break the links for anything that is effected).
But that means you have to be on a filesystem that supports it. (so no
vfat, HFS+ generally performs poorly, and not ftp...)

There is also plans to support 'shallow' checkouts, which only contain a
little bit of history, but let you reference more history elsewhere.
'light' checkouts are a little bit too light, as they can't work when
disconnected. A 'shallow' would let you commit locally, etc, it just
wouldn't have a complete history for doing stuff like merging. But we
don't have that yet.

John
=:->
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