[ANN] Announcing new extension for alternative subrepo functionality.

[paul_nathan at selinc.com]

All,

I am exceptionally pleased to present Guestrepos, an extension for 
handling components for large products. I have alluded at length to its 
functionality before in the "Alternatives to subrepos" thread, but as of 
now, I have been approved to release it.  While I've been the public 
contact, it was really Ben Smith who took our half-baked ideas and cooked 
them into a working system. Thanks, Ben! 

What guestrepos (GR) offers is the ability to track branches per 
repository, provide a stable state for expert users to manage server moves 
and branch switching and non-recursive merges and commits. We're using it 
internally, and we think it's going to be really the way forward for us. 
In addition to simply being an awesome concept tool, we *also( took the 
time to put together some tests to help keep ourselves honest as we 
maintain GuestRepos. 

Of course, we do have some known issues - documented in the readme- , and 
they will be dealt with, but it's in a usable form now (deployed on our 
internal systems). Bug reports are accepted, as well as any fixes.

How do you get it?

The home address of Guestrepos is: https://bitbucket.org/selinc/guestrepo

Generally, it  is intended to manage large collections of subrepositories 
(n > 10). It is wholly expected that n > 100, and that there are very 
complex configurations involved. To quote from the README:

---
Use case:

- Many products, multiple projects within those products, multiple
  developers within those projects, multiple branches per developer

- Source code shared in a multiplicity of configurations

- Third party code (possibly patched on some branches)

- A given module may have multiple versions going into the same product


Hg subrepos do not handle the sharing of components well, due to the
recursive merge from the top (super) repo and requirement to lock at a
specific version.

Guestrepo's goal is to overcome these limitations.
---


I am very excited about guestrepos, and we've been looking forward to this 
release for a while.

- - -
Regards,
Paul Nathan
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