Should we use subrepos ourselves?

[Martin Geisler]

Hi guys,

I had a meeting with my customer today where we dicussed subrepos (as
usual) and half-joking, they suggested that we try using them ourselves
for the Mercurial repository...

I'm sure you remember how long it took until we began using named
branches for Mercurial and how it improved our workflow. I'm not sure we
will see the same improvement if we split our source tree into subrepos,
but I'm sure we will quickly feel some pain and thus fix some issues
with subrepos. You know, eat your own dogfood and everything... :-)

We already have a good separation at the top level in our source tree
and we could consider turning some of these directories into subrepos:

  contrib/
  doc/
  hgext/
  i18n/
  mercurial/
  tests/

I admit I don't see the big advantage of doing so since they all depend
on each other, but perhaps it would be nice for a translator to be able
to clone i18n/ alone? He would not be able to update or test the
translation, but he would save (a little) bandwidth.

What do you think?

-- 
Martin Geisler

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