Re: The essential problems of moving from CVS

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 01:17:47AM +0900, Curt Sampson wrote:
 > And anyway, I'm not even clear as to what the point (or points) are
 > of partial checkouts, as I'm only imagining use cases rather than
 > knowing about real ones.

The primary point is either to reduce disk usage or reduce the amount
of time taken by SCM ops.

git is a lot faster than cvs, but on a tree the size of netbsd or
pkgsrc any operation that has to scan the entire working copy takes
long enough to be annoying, even on a fast machine with plenty of RAM.
And more such scans happen than do when using cvs.

Working with NetBSD trees in Mercurial I've found it makes a really
noticeable difference in general useability to prune the stuff I don't
actively need. This is easy enough to do when (as I have been) one's
using Mercurial as a glorified version of quilt on top of a CVS
checkout, but a different matter if it's the primary SCM.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost