On 21Mar2014 09:34, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 9:19 AM, Gregory Ewing > > Also, unless the project is truly ancient, the > > whole history might not be as big as you expect. > > The code presumably grew to its present size > > incrementally, in an approximately monotonic > > manner, so the sum of all the diffs is probably > > about the same order of magnitude as the current > > code size. > > > > As an experiment, I just cloned a copy of the > > CPython repository, and it's about 300MB. A > > tarball of Python 3.2 that I downloaded and > > compiled earlier is about 75MB. That's a ratio > > of about 4, and CPython is a pretty ancient > > project! > > Yep! But cloning requires that you have Mercurial installed and, more > importantly, know how to use it. We don't have a huge proliferation of > source control systems these days, but if someone says "Our code is > available via Perforce", I'm going to just look for a tarball > download, rather than figure out a source control system I don't know.
Someone intending to clone the project and develop will probably want the whole repository; as Gregory says - they can then easily push/pull with others. For Frank, the size of the repo is not the size of the bare code * number of changesets. There are many diff-level steps in there, making for a much smaller size. And code is small; really really small. Regarding having Mercurial installed, that is very easy, and after you've gone (eg): hg clone https://bitbucket.org/cameron_simpson/css my-copy-of-cameron's-css (or wherever the public repository is published), you can of course then walk away and work. You no longer need the public copy at all. With a DVCS the threshold is low and the advantages are high (hg or git; I'm an hg person myself). Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <c...@zip.com.au> I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. - English Professor, Ohio University -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list