Version Control Software

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> The advantage of DVCS is that everybody has a full copy of the repo.
> The disadvantage of the DVCS is that every MUST have a full copy of the
> repo.  When a repo gets big, you may not want to pull all of that data
> just to get the subtree you need.

Yeah, and depending on size, that can be a major problem. While git
_will_ let you make a shallow clone, it won't let you push from that,
so it's good only for read-only repositories (we use git to manage
software deployments at work - shallow clones are perfect) or for
working with patch files.

Hmm. ~/cpython/.hg is 200MB+, but ~/pike/.git is only 86MB. Does
Mercurial compress its content? A tar.gz of each comes down, but only
to ~170MB and ~75MB respectively, so I'm guessing the bulk of it is
already compressed. But 200MB for cpython seems like a lot.

Anyway, this problem is a good reason for dividing a repository up
into logically-separate parts. If you'll often want only one subtree,
maybe that shouldn't be a subtree of a monolithic repository.

ChrisA