Use a thin shell repository to manage guest repos?

[Piotr Kalinowski]

Peter Haase <kontakt at phaase.net> writes:

> When using sub repositories it's recommend to use 'thin' shell
> repositories only, i.e. separate 'real' code from repositories used to
> manage subrepositories (
> http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Subrepository#Recommendations ).
>
> I wonder if this is also true if using the guest repository extension.
> Does someone has some experiences?

For the record, the page on subrepositories mentions that if subrepo
becomes unavailable at recorded location, the repository will become
broken to the point where you cannot check it out. This is the most
important reason why you'd want to use thin shell repo: you'll only
break the shell without affecting subrepos.

Guest repos on the other hand won't break the usual mercurial commands,
as all the new functionality is implemented using separate commands. So
in their case it will be safe. (In fact, I did commit an incorrect guest
repo URL, and indeed I were able to fix this easily, as everything
except guest repo commands worked. Actually, grpull still pulled
remaining guest repos.)

Best regards,
Piotr Kalinowski