One Big Repo

[David Bremner]

tchomby wrote:

>On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 10:11:59PM +1100, Ben Finney wrote
>If you've been working feverishly, maybe you've had to much coffee, it comes to 
>the end of the day and you have to commit what you've changed. With one git 
>repo a simple git status will show you what you need to do. With many repos, 
>you would have to do git status many times, probably you'd forget to commit 
>some changes. Same with committing, pushing and pulling and checking out new 
>repos. mr lets you do these commands on multiple repos at once but it adds the 
>trouble of managing mr and its mrconfig file.

I have done both. One big repo with SVN, and now mr+git.  I think one
big repo is fine, as long as the history is not something you care
about very much.  By now I am too dependent on having a reasonably
clean history in each project (for example to generate patches to send
to collegues) to go back to the one big repo approach.  For the kind
of work-log stuff you mention, I use org-mode in emacs.

I think the conclusions are roughly the same as when we discussed on
this list whether svn might actually be better at maintaining a home
directory: it depends whether you want to make snapshots, or to really
use version control in your work.  Both points of view are defensible;
unfortunately, once one's history is a mess, there may be no
reasonable way to disentangle it.

I use both approaches myself: some repos (like my .org files) I just
make snapshots, because I am pretty confident that I will never need
to "work-with" that history. Other projects, if when I do "mr commit"
there is something to commit, that probably means I abort, and go back
and look at the situation more carefully.

David