When does it make sense to use subrepositories?

[Matt Mackall]

On Thu, 2013-04-18 at 21:41 +0200, Carsten Fuchs wrote:
> Am 2013-04-18 20:52, schrieb Matt Mackall:
> > If the answer is yes, your options are:
> >
> > - check everything into one repo and hope you don't have to merge in
> > "upstream" changes often
> > - use subrepos
> 
> Personally, I very much like the approach that is explained in this blog post:
> http://happygiraffe.net/blog/2008/02/07/vendor-branches-in-git/
> 
> It's explained for Git, but the beauty of this approach is that it also works with 
> Mercurial, and even better, its very simple, because it only uses the "normal" feature 
> set of a version control system. No extras for subtree, submodules, subrepos, sub... 
> required.   ;-)

This page describes -the most basic feature of DVCS- as if it were a
special technique. Yes, it's very easy to track an upstream vendor repo
in a DVCS, it's called 'clone'.

But that won't help you when you want to track customized versions of
100 third-party packages in one project, like the operating system image
in your set-top box.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.