Forest

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Feb 28, 2008, at 2:34 PM, Thomas Arendsen Hein wrote:

> * Florent Guillaume <fg at nuxeo.com> [20080228 01:46]:
>> I'm considering integrating the forest extension directly into the
>> main hg commands, so that for instance you can "hg pull" and if  
>> forest
>> is enabled it would do the equivalent of current "hg fpull".
>
> This is a good idea.

I agree.  The need for something like Subversion's externals facility  
is rather huge.  However, I never found the time to use forest, as I  
was always put off by its large command set, so I don't have a picture  
of how this would work in practice.

Rather than run off and start hacking, I think that something like  
this is important enough to have a picture and discussion of how it  
ought to work beforehand.  Is the model used by forest actually  
appropriate?

For example, commands currently take pains to avoid crossing repo  
boundaries.  If I'm in a parent repository, and I run "hg add subrepo/ 
foo", what should happen?  If I run "clone" against a remote  
repository that's a forest, how does it discover that the remote repo  
has subrepositories?  How do I clone *just* a parent repository?

As you can see, there are lots of questions to answer, and this is  
just the result of about 90 seconds of thought, nothing deep.  It  
wouldn't do to just slap the forest command semantics into the core.

	<b