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NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 09:55:26 -0500
From: Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: Debian build scripts on a public Monotone server
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Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 16:56:16 +0200
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Date: 2006-09-27T16:56:16+02:00
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Samuel Tardieu <sam@rfc1149.net> writes:
> What version did you test? Mercurial uses hard links when you work on
> the same file system, making cloning a very cheap operation.

I know[1].  The advantage disappears as soon as you modify a file:
Mercurial then breaks the hard link and duplicates the entire history
for the file.  In my trials with GCC, many files were changed between
each version, so the space advantage was almost completely lost, even
if the changes to each file were actually small.

The use of hard links is a poor kludge to minimise the impact of
unshared histories.

[1] http://www.ada-france.org/debian/distributed-version-control-systems.html

> Moreover, since Mercurial 0.9 is out, the disk usage has been cut by
> 40%.

I tried 0.8.1 and my test consumed 686 megabytes.  If I take your word
and reduce it by 40%, I get 411.6 Mb, which is still much, much more
than Monotone's 183 megabytes (in Monotone 0.24) or 166 megabytes (in
0.26).

I stand by my opinion that Mercurial is only second best, after
Monotone.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.