What is the purpose of the "Use pull protocol to copy metadata" hg clone option?

[David Dyer-Bennet]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 03:23, Didly Bom wrote:

> I have been thinking about this a bit further and actually I do not
> understand why would you ever want to use hard links when cloning, rather
> than a proper copy. And even if there were some cases in which you may
> want
> to do that, it does not seem to me that that is what the user may want in
> most cases, so I think that having "hg clone" use hard links by default
> does
> not seem right (IMHO!).

Mercurial pushes this feature as a disk-space saver.  In particular, since
one popular workflow involves making multiple local clones (often one
clone of the remote, then a local working clone of the local clone, and
then feature-specific working clones from there), this is the common
response to claims that Mercurial will eat too much disk space.

> Perhaps I do not understand the benefits of using hard-linking, but why
> would I want to have 2 clones where if I modify one the other one is
> modified as well?

I've got emacs configured to separate hard-linked files when I edit one of
them.  I believe this is the default behavior of editors that don't let
you choose.  So that's not what's going on here; it's just saving disk
space (copy-on-write).

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David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
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