Shrink your HG repository

When I used Subversion and Ant for my projects, I had the habit of committing the required libraries together with the sources. I think that it's a solution that still makes sense with those two tools, as you can checkout a certain version of a project and you have all you need to compile it on the local disk. Things change with Mercurial, since you'll clone the whole history of the project, that is all the versions of the iibraries that have been used in the past, and a Mercurial repo can quickly grow huge in this circumstance. For instance, when I converted the blueMarine repos from Subversion to Mercurial, still using Ant, I got stuff large several hundreds megabytes. This is an annoyance for people that want to quickly clone the repo and try compiling the application. With Maven, of course, the repository is smaller because it doesn't contain the libraries; they will be downloaded as artifacts, but only the specific versions that you need for the current version of the project, not for all the history. One of the extra advantages of Mercurial (and, generally speaking, I think that the concept applies to Distributed SCMs) is that you get administration utilities for the repository as first class tools. For instance, Mercurial has a command, named 'convert', that allows to convert an existing, local repository from Subversion, Git, Bazaar, others... and Mercurial itself. What's the point in conver...

Date: February, 22 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici/archive/2010/02/22/shrink-your-hg-repository

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