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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