Mercurial subrepository from a non-nested / sibling directory?

Question

Is it possible to create a subrepository using a sibling path?

Subversion is our \"chosen\" VCS here, but I\'ve already had quite a few issues with out of date comm

Answer 1

Subrepositories are always inside another repository. In other words, subrepositories lets you version a collection of repositories where some repositories are nested inside other repositories. Subrepositories can thus not be siblings without creating an outer repository.

The relative paths you're talking about are used when Mercurial needs to figure out where to get a new subrepository from. That is, when you run hg update (or when it's run for you as part of hg clone) and Mercurial notices a .hgsub file, then it needs to create the subrepositories mentioned there. To create the subrepo, Mercurial uses the path on right-hand side:

sub-A = relative/path
sub-B = C:/absolute/path

Here sub-A will be checked out in the root of your working copy using the command

hg clone <default path for main repo>/relative/path sub-A

and sub-B is checked out using the command

hg clone C:/absolute/path sub-B

That's all — it's a very simple mechanism. I've tried to describe this in my subrepository guide and it's also explained in the wiki.

For your case, you can make a thin shell repository for the parts that belong together. This repo will be like Project1 above and have Program1, Program2, Service1, etc as subrepos. The .hgsub will look like this:

Program1 = Program1
Program2 = Program2
Service1 = Service1
Service2 = Service2

By using "trivial subrepo paths" you make things easy: a clone looks just like the clone source and everything is kept together.

A final note: unless you use Program1 or Service1 in other projects, then you should just put everything into a single repository.