CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mercurial
DiBosco
DiBosco

Reputation: 876

Storing PCB files *and* software files in the same Mercurial repo

I have my Banana Pi set up as my Mercurial server. It works well for me for my software as generally speaking I have firmware and that's about it in my repositories. I can access it via open VPN from anywhere in the world. However, I have started to use version control for my PCB files as well now, due to a new CAD system which complicates my old, crude but effective way of doing my PCB archiving and backup. (Also, everything in my new CAD system, all the PCBs and schamtics, are text files which makes version control work nicely.)

So, with Mercurial I started doing as I did with software and creating a new repo for my PCB for one of the boards I'm updating for a customer, and immediately came across an issue that svn seems to cope with easily and I was wondering whether Mercurial can do the same.

I have my BH0001 project repository which has all the embedded C in it and I have started creating a new issue of the PCB for which the C code is used. I had to create a new Mercurial repo called BH0001_pcb to differentiate between code and PCB. With svn you can have a project repo and then Hardware and Software directories within the project number, but still be able to check out the two different types of files to different places independently.

I could, of course, clone the BH0001 software repository to a local machine, add the PCB info in a new folder in the local Mercurial repo send it all back to the server and it would be perfectly happy. The problem then comes when checking out because I would be cloning both firmware and PCB on to a machine when I might only want one or the other.

Also, this goes against how I store stuff locally. In my /username/home directory I have a Software directory and a CAD directory and within those I have projects. So I would have:

home/CAD/CustomerName/BH0001

and

home/Software/CustomerName/BH0001.

If I'm to carry on using my current method do I have to:

  1. Change my local directory structures to be something like:

home/Projects/CustomerName/BH0001/CAD

and

home/Projects/CustomerName/BH0001/Software

  1. Suck it up and use things like ProjectName_pcb for separate repos.

  2. Some other way I can't think of/can't find/am unaware of? e.g. There's a way of checking out part of a Mercurial repository to one directory and a different part of the repo to a different directory.

Or should I just use svn if I really want to carry on as I have?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 76

Answers (1)

planetmaker
planetmaker

Reputation: 6044

With default mercurial you currently cannot do partial repository clones as you can do with SVN. So your approach to use separate repositories is a good choice.

However there ways to achieve a similar result: sub-repositories. In your case I'd create a parent repository which contains your two current repositories as sub-repositories. Mind though, sub-repositories have some rough edges, so read the linked page carefully - I'd like to especially stress that it's good practise to have a parent repo which basically only contains the 'real' repos but not much on its own.

There exist ideas like a thin or narrow clone (which is somewhat identical to what SVN does), but I haven't seen them in production.

Upvotes: 1

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