Re: Marginal features

On Sat, May 07, 2005 at 11:20:14AM -0400, Walter Landry wrote:
> lightweight branches - Making it possible to branch from a project
> without having to lug all of the history around.  I think ArX and
> tla/baz are the only ones to do this.  Darcs' tag feature might
> support this somewhat, but I am not sure.  Full support requires
> recording what repository a branch came from.  Codeville, Monotone,
> BK, etc. all have a single repo that everyone copies.  I have read
> reports of this causing problems with BK, although I don't have a
> reference ready.  Basically, the repo got up to 9.2 GB, most of which
> was not needed day-to-day.

Arch/ArX-style continuations aren't the only solution to this problem.
Like 'darcs get --partial', we plan to support something like
'monotone pull --partial', which gives you only recent history
locally.  (There are some tricky corner cases to work out, involving
what happens when you then synchronize with someone else who's done a
partial pull, but these seem solvable with care.  Also will have to
think it through in the context of precise cdv-merge, which may suck,
but again should in theory be possible.)  In this model, it's assumed
that someone does keep the full history; unlike the Arch/ArX model,
this isn't an aspect of history, it's just an optimization you may
choose to make in your local usage.  (And can tune to your own usage,
instead of having to, say, occasionally branch from mainline-old to
mainline-new, just to help out people with small disk space.)

-- Nathaniel

-- 
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  -- advice of Murray B. Emeneau on the occasion of his 100th birthday