Re: VCS comparison table

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:24:15 -0400
Aaron Bentley [off-list ref] wrote:

The key thing about a checkout is that it's stored in a different
location from its repository.  This provides a few benefits:

- - you can publish a repository without publishing its working tree,
  possibly using standard mirroring tools like rsync.

Yeah, even in git you typically don't publish your working tree when
making it available for cloning.  In fact the native git network
protocol doesn't even have a way to transfer working trees.

- - you can have working trees on local systems while having the
  repository on a remote system.  This makes it easy to work on one
  logical branch from multiple locations, without getting out of sync.

That is a very nice feature.  Git would be improved if it could
support that mode of operation as well.

- - you can use a checkout to maintain a local mirror of a read-only
  branch (I do this with http://bazaar-vcs.com/bzr/bzr.dev).

I'm not sure what you mean here.  A bzr checkout doesn't have any history
does it?  So it's not a mirror of a branch, but just a checkout of the
branch head?

If so, Git can export a tarball of a branch (actually a snapshot as at
any given commit) which can be mirrored out.

Sean