[Monotone-devel] Re: Sharing subprojects between projects

[Pavel Cahyna]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 01:40:27PM +0200, Richard Levitte wrote:
> In message <address@hidden> on Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:21:36 +0200, Ludovic 
> Brenta <address@hidden> said:
> 
> ludovic> I used Monotone's merge_into_dir for that purpose once.  I
> ludovic> suggest you have a look at it.
> 
> It's true that it's (well, it and the subsequent propagates) the most
> supported way to do this.  The flip side of the coin is that it
> requires that maintainers of the subprojects remember to do the
> subsequent propagates a little now and then, which doesn't scale well
> for popular subprojects (libraries, for example?).
> 
> As an alternative, I could easily imagine having a file _MTN/subdirs
> or something like that in the main workspace that describe
> subdirectories that need to be treated as separate workspaces in a way
> that's transparent to the user.  Unfortunately, that would require
> that each user is informed of the relationship between projects and
> "install" subdirectories manually.  The real beef is having that kind
> of information in a distributed way, so whenever a project is checked
> out or updated, that kind of information, as well as the
> subdirectories themselves, get checked out or updated automagically.

Subversion has svn:externals property for this. Could monotone have a
similar mtn:externals property, which would contain a selector and would
cause monotone to checkout a specified revision in the directory marked by
this property?

Pavel