trying to get my brain wrapped around mercurial

[tomhorsley at adelphia.net]

> In Mercurial, a repo is just a directory. It holds the (hidden) metadata 
> ...

That definitely makes things clearer. I'd recommend sticking it on the wiki
somewhere with links from the glossary working directory and repo
entries so more folks with my same brain problems can find it easily :-).

> As I've tried to explain, when you copy or clone a repo you are just 
> copying a dir, with both the repo metadata dir and the "working dir" 
> contents (the repo dir without the repo metadata dir). There's no 
> database work involved, just normal filesystem operations, so it's 
> trivial. 

So trivial describes the quality of operations involved, not the quantity :-).
If I'm cloning a repo for the first time in a project with a huge history of
changesets over a slow network link, I could be at it for quite a while.
But at least that's a one time only cost, and just have to push and pull
changes after that (if I'm starting to understand things).