Status of adding "overlay repositories" to standard Mercurial?

[Kelly O'Hair]

Teamware child workspaces have complete copies of all the files,
but it does allow you to have partial workspaces, so very often
the workspaces you had would be just small subset workspaces.

One trick with teamware workspaces was to create a somewhat fake
child workspace by duplicating the directory tree but using SCCS
softlinks to the parent SCCS directories, sharing the data, but
in a very dangerous way. Not sure how many people did that.

The Mercurial hardlinks is very clever and is a great help in
reducing disk space usage.

Teamware really just managed SCCS files, the individual source file
changes were actually managed by SCCS. So 99% of the 'metadata' was
just SCCS files.

-kto


Stuart Marks wrote:
> Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> This is a very interesting concept, because AFAICT it makes Mercurial
>> match very closely the behavior of Sun's Teamware system.  Working with
>> a ``workspace-tree'' is then much much cheaper in disk space than
>> keeping the entire metadata in every clone.
> 
> I'm not sure which aspect of overlay repositories matches Sun's old 
> Teamware system. As far as I know Teamware makes copies of all history 
> and metadata (SCCS files) for every workspace. (In other respects, 
> though, Mercurial is already similar to Teamware, irrespective of 
> overlay repositories.)
> 
> I do agree that overlay repositories are an interesting concept, and I'd 
> like to learn more about them.
> 
> s'marks
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