Forest? Branches? And other beginner questions...

[Matt Mackall]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2007 at 08:49:25PM -0700, Stuart W. Marks wrote:
> I certainly understand the rationale for having separate repositories for 
> separate software components, both in Teamware and in Mercurial.
> 
> The thing I don't understand about forests is whether there are any 
> semantics to them. For example, is "hg fpull" any different from
> 
>     for d in $SUBDIRS ; do
>         hg pull -R $d
>     done
> 
> ? If not, is it worth having an extension for this? I suspect there is 
> something more going on, though, since the ForestExtension page mention 
> snapshot files but doesn't explain what they do....

As I understand it, a forest snapshot is a list of all the changeset
ids for the contained repositories.

> I'm also totally unclear on the semantics of nested repositories, how they 
> work, and even whether they work. So, it appears that I have my own set of 
> beginner questions. :-)

Currently nested repositories are completely ignored.

I suppose if we were clever, we could come up with some sensible
forest-like semantics that just transparently worked. Making this work
smoothly would be interesting. Things like log at the top level would
be hard-pressed to deal with logs of nested repos. Bears some thought.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.