Branches are Bad? (was: Re: What are the strengths of Mercurial for you?)

Sean Russell ser at germane-software.com
Sun Jan 11 14:29:15 UTC 2009


Doug Philips wrote:
> On or about  Friday, January 09, 2009, at 02:17PM, John D. Mitchell indited:
>   
>> (D) Branches
>>       - I think they are a mistake to have in Hg. Partly it's the  
>> focus issue, partly they exist because of other missing capabilities  
>> such as integral sub-repos, shallow/partial clones, and cherrypicking,  
>> and of course partly because there are so many people "stuck" in the  
>> Centralized SCM mindset.
>>     
>
> Since branching happens with distributed version control, I am guessing you really mean "named branches?"
> For what my team uses them for(1) none of the "missing capabilities" would make any difference.
> Could you elaborate a bit more on the exact problem/issue you have?
>   
I'll provide a counter-example, of where cloning-as-branching has issues.

    1047 % time hg clone scout scout2
    updating working directory
    6171 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
    hg clone scout scout2  16.11s user 8.22s system 10% cpu 3:42.14 total

So this is nearly 4 minutes to clone a repository, not to mention the 
time and effort of having to create and configure a new project in 
Eclipse for every clone.  The VCS should not be an impediment to 
development; this is why _we_ use named branches.

--- SER



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