[OT] Question about Git branches

[Robert Kern]

On 2014-09-16 17:25, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 2:08 AM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Yes, but this is due to different design decisions of git and Mercurial. git
>> prioritized the multiple branches in a single clone use case; Mercurial
>> prioritized re-cloning. It's natural to do this kind of branching in git,
>> and more natural to re-clone in Mercurial.
>
> Ah, I wasn't aware of that philosophical difference. Does hg use
> hardlinks or something to minimize disk usage when you clone, or does
> it actually copy everything? (Or worse, does it make the new directory
> actually depend on the old one?)

I haven't kept up with the internals recently, but at least at one point, 
hardlinks were the order of the day, yes.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco