History-less repository?

[Vadim Lebedev]

Kurt Granroth wrote:
> The development group I'm with is going to switch our repos from CVS to
> *something* in the coming months.  The obvious successor is Subversion
> (with Perforce as the dark horse) but I'm pushing hard for Mercurial.
> It's been an uphill battle since a previous test run with darcs was a
> complete failure... enough of one that the consensus of most of the
> office is that "all DVCS == immature and hard to use".  "Geek toys" but
> not suitable for normal (non-geeky Windows) developers.
>
> I've made significant headway in changing those opinions but am now
> stuck on an issue that caught me off guard.  That is, having the entire
> history of the repository everywhere makes it "easier" to
> catastrophically steal company IP (stolen laptops and the like).  With
> CVS or Subversion, you "only" get the current snapshot of code and need
> access to the central server plus the right authentication to get
> history and branches and the like.  With Hg, it's all there.
>
> I'm not convinced that that's as big of a deal as it's made out to be...
>  but that remains as a legitimate worry so I *have* to address it.
>
> What I want, then, is the ability to create an Hg repo that has no prior
> history.  It must be able to merge back into the mainline, though.
>
> Here's one thought I had:
>
> 1. Rsync over the source files at the beginning of a project release cycle
> 2. Create a brand new repo from just the source files
> 3. Code to your heart's content... the only history is the current patches
> 4. When it's time to merge with the mainline, use something like Tailor
>
> Would that work?  Has anybody done anything like this?  And if so, is
> there a better way?
>
> Kurt
>
>   
One obvious hack which comes to mind is to make .hg  directory  be a 
symlink pointing to a NFS or SMB mounted volume


Vadim


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