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

[Matt Mackall]

On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 12:33 -0500, ser at germane-software.com wrote:
> Quoting "John D. Mitchell" <jdmitchell at gmail.com>:
> 
> > Re: Eclipse
> > [...Insert snarky comment about crappy tools... :-)]
> 
> I won't argue with you about that.
> 
> > Re: Clone time
> >
> > Indeed, that much time does suck.
> >
> > Though wouldn't it be much nicer to have good sub-repo handling and
> > partial so that you check out just the areas that you need to work on
> > without dragging all of the rest along with it?
> 
> In general, yes.  However, this is a single project, so to develop,  
> build, and test it, devs need everything.  Part of the time is the  
> size of the project, but there's also a huge amount of history, as  
> well.  Partial clones would not be useful, unless it meant partial  
> history.

A huge amount of history shouldn't matter. If you've got a benchmark
that shows it does, we'd like to see it.

Also, I'll note that your test showed very little CPU load. It looks
like you're mostly limited by disk bandwidth. How long does a clone -U
take (should be just a few seconds) and how long does a subsequent
checkout take? 

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.