large repository access

[Franklin Siler]

PROBLEM- I have several repositories which are larger than 10GB, and I am almost out of space on the 1TB disk in my laptop.  These are mostly media, such as music and photos, so they are mostly read in low-bandwidth applications such as playing an mp3 or viewing a JPEG.

IDEA- develop software which takes a .hg repository and allows read-only access to a given revision using FUSE.  This way, you don't need to actually check out a copy of a repository in order to access it.  Future work could support writable access using the equivalent of a union filesystem, and possibly even allow commits of these writes.

I'm imagining that a naive implementation will be quite slow, but I'm wondering:
- are there other solutions to save disk space?
- does anyone else have a use for this?
- is this a Bad Idea for any reason other than performance?

I'd appreciate any constructive criticism.  Thanks.

Cheers,

Frank Siler
Siler Industrial Analytics
314.799.9405