Question

I have a project that I am developing built off CodeIgniter. The main part of the project is a private system I am creating, but I want to add it to source control, to gain all the associated goodies. Now I’m using Mercurial, so I did the whole hg init bit, so I’ve got the repository set up.

Now, one of the things I’ve done is to make a library for CodeIgniter, which I use in this project. Now I want to make this library open, so I need a separate repo for that.

For anyone unfamiliar with CodeIgniter library development, here’s a reference:

application
  /config <- configuration files
  /libraries <- library logic in here

Now I will probably develop a few more libraries in the course of this project, so I can’t just dump a repo in the application folder without clumping them all together.

What I did was this:

dev/ci/library <- library here
dev/project <- project here

Now in both of those folders, I have made a repository. What I want to do is make the project repository automatically reference the library repository, so I can have a private and a public repository, as I explained earlier.

The main way to do this, I have read, is to use subrepositories, but I can only find examples on nested ones (which are unclear anyway, I find). How do I make it reference another repository like svn:externals?

Answer 1

You are correct, subrepos in Mercurial (or submodules in Git) are based on a nested organization.
But in your specific case you need:

• two separate repos,
• not nested

A way to reconcile both organizations (yours and the nested “subrepo”) would be to have three repos

• a parent repo (private one, as in can be pushed to a private repo)
• the project (private one, as in can be pushed to a private repo)
• the library (public one, as in can be pushed to a public repo)

That would give the following:

/dev
  .hg (private repo)
  .hgsubs (declare the two nested repos 'project' and 'ci/library')
  project
    .hg (private repo for your project)
    config
    .hgignore (for ignoring anyhting from libraries)
    libraries (private directory, not version)
      (symlink to /dev/ci/library)
  ci
    library
      .hg (public repo 

That way, you keep:

• your two repo separate as you want
• a link between the two in order to be able to get back those two repo at the exact reference you left them (i.e. you last pushed each of those repos).