Re: Re: Mercurial repo cloning

On Sat, 29 Aug 2009, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> Guessing from the subject of your mail, I think you want a tarball of 
> the repo with history. The most efficient way to get something like that 
> would be a "hg bundle". That would be a 730MB download for DEV300 as of 
> now. We probably will have such a bundle available after the pilot (ask 
> Heiner). As of now, you will need to "hg clone" from
>  http://hg.services.openoffice.org/hg/DEV300

The main problem with direct 'clone' calls is that in the event the 
network connection breaks, everything is lost as this cannot be resumed 
because Mercurial will roll back everything it has received, not only one 
last incomplete changeset.

Furthermore I strongly believe that using 'clone' might be a lot slower 
than downloading a binary file (might it be a 'bundle' or a 'tarball') 
over 'http' or 'ftp' with a modern download assistant using multiple 
connection at the same time.

For now - after reading an old thread about 'clone' command not being 
resumable on the Mercurial list - I followed a workaround mentiond there: 
One can initialize an emtpy repo and then use a sequence of 'hg pull -r 
<rev>' commands where the <rev> is then increased by a lower number of 
changesets.

The only problem is that one needs the long format changeset id's for 
that. I got it the manual hard way through the Webinterface where one can 
jump forward by 1000, 10000 or 30000 changesets.

Looking at SVN repo I had originally expected much more and huge 
changesets but it seems DEV300 does not to contain the complete history.

Even if looking at the CWS, it appears clear that getting a copy of a CWS 
also requires special treatment in order to not download everything again.

This means, 'clone' is not an option here, but one should 'clone' or 'cp' 
an already existing copy of DEV300 locally, and then 'hg pull' that CWS 
into the copy; otherwise everything is transferred again and much disk 
space is wasted.

Regards

Guido