Subrepositories

[Michael McNeil Forbes]

> On Aug 31, 2016, at 8:56 AM, Kevin Bullock <kbullock+mercurial at ringworld.org> wrote:
>> On Aug 31, 2016, at 10:10, Nicolas Pinault <nicolasp at aaton.com> wrote:
>> Le 31/08/2016 à 16:57, Kevin Bullock a écrit:
>> 
>> I use big libraries (boost and others) in my project. I don't want these libraries to be added to my main repo. So I decided to use  sub-repositories.
> 
> That is a classic use case where people want to reach for subrepos (or svn externals or other equivalent features). But it's almost always the wrong solution. Fetching and maintaining dependencies is a problem that's much better solved by your build system and your operating system. I think CMake is commonly used for this purpose in C++ projects. There's also Boost Build: <http://www.boost.org/build/>

Although your build system is probably the way to go, if you want to stick with a VC approach for managing some dependencies, then I have found myrepos http://myrepos.branchable.com to be useful.  It can maintain weak "subrepositories" that point to the original source repositories of your dependencies.

Michael.