Re: Making NetBeans' Mercurial More Manageable

On 11/04/2011 05:00 AM, Petr Jiricka wrote:
> While creating patches is possible even if you download the source zip, having read-only svn repository would be much more convenient.

Yes, because you can 'svn diff' without having to keep a backup copy as a baseline, and 'svn up' to refresh a diff against upstream changes.

> wouldn't this also work well if you get the full (trunk) source tree?

Potentially; it would just be a big checkout.

> I am not sure how a newbie contributor would identify the exact subset they need

A tool could be written to do the hard part for you. For example:

NBSVN=....
# see [1] for syntax
svn co --depth empty $NBSVN/trunk nb
cd nb
svn up --set-depth infinity nbbuild
ant -Dcluster.config=java check-out-svn-modules build-nozip

> Any ideas on what could be the size of the svn sources? For the zip download, the download size is 165 MB and unpacked size on disk is 650 MB

Not sure, but some things to keep in mind:

1. The working copy will use double the disk space you might expect. (An SVN working copy has every file stored _twice_, so diff and revert can run offline.) If bandwidth 
and not disk is the limiting factor, this may not matter much.

2. An SVN network checkout is likely to involve much more coordination than simple downloads, so checking out all of trunk will inevitably be much slower than downloading 
a ZIP of the same.


[1] http://www.subversion.org.cn/svnbook/nightly/svn.advanced.sparsedirs.html