Re: Has 3.0.3 been released?

[Aron Griffis <aron@hp.com>]

Keir Fraser wrote:  [Wed Oct 18 2006, 08:51:05AM EDT]
> > The sparse tree has been an enourmous pain in the neck for me and
> > many others.  If all that pain is outweighed by quicker cloning of
> > Linux repos, then you must do that much more often than I can
> > imagine.
> 
> Yes we do. One option is for us to keep a private sparse tree and
> have a script that pulls out patches and applies them to a public
> full Linux tree.

This may be well-known already, but if the issue is with the
time/space taken by "hg clone", you can make clones faster with 
"cp -al".

Normally "hg clone" will create hard links of everything in the .hg
directory, but it makes copies for the working set.  Using "cp -al"
doubles the savings by making the working set hard links as well.

All the normal tools (patch for example) will handle hard links
correctly, treating them as COW.  AFAIK the only tool that needs
special configuration is vim:

    set backupcopy+=breakhardlink

$ time hg clone xen-unstable.hg xen-unstable.hg-clone
real    0m8.293s

$ time cp -al xen-unstable.hg xen-unstable.hg-clone2
real    0m0.408s

$ time cp -al linux-2.6 linux-2.6-clone
real    0m1.644s

Aron