Splitting working dir away from repository. Is it possible?

[Douglas Philips]

On 2008 Jan 18, at 10:06 AM, Mark A. Flacy indited:
> On 2008.01.18 06:30, Marcin Kasperski wrote:
>>> I like strong separation between working files and repository...
>>> It's logicaly consistent, at least for me.
>>> It's no logical reasons to have repository under working directory,
>> at
>>> least for me again.
>>
>> Well, maybe you should reconsider your idea of using DVCS. Mercurial,
>> Git, Bazaar and others are all built around the idea of binding
>> working directories with repository.
>
> Funny thing is that the first DVCS that I used was larch/tla, which
> *does* support having the repository somewhere else.
> So it's certainly possible to have a DVCS that doesn't make it  
> quite so
> easy to nuke your repository along with the working directory or  
> require
> your working partition to be large enough to hold the entire  
> history of
> your project.
...
> There's nothing about DVCS that forces you to co-mingle the repository
> and the working directory.

Pre-cise-ly!

The idea of "local repo" is hard to pin down. After all, even with  
the highly worshipped Linux, I can use file system mount points to  
make my .hg directories be other than where they seem to be.

Personally, I'd like to keep the repo on a USB stick and the working  
directories not (compiles go slower, yadda, yadda).

No doubt I can do that with various trickeries (depending on the  
platform), and so the question is whether or not hg should be  
friendly or even embrace that, and if so, at what cost...

	--Doug