Distributed version control for HUGE projects - is it feasible?

Posted by Vilx- on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Vilx-
Published on 2010-03-19T10:07:37Z Indexed on 2010/03/19 10:11 UTC
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dvcs

We're pretty happy with SVN right now, but Joel's tutorial intrigued me. So I was wondering - would it be feasible in our situation too?

The thing is - our SVN repository is HUGE. The software itself has a 15 years old legacy and has survived several different source control systems already. There are over 68,000 revisions (changesets), the source itself takes up over 100MB and I cant even begin to guess how many GB the whole repository consumes.

The problem then is simple - a clone of the whole repository would probably take ages to make, and would consume far more space on the drive that is remotely sane. And since the very point of distributed version control is to have a as many repositories as needed, I'm starting to get doubts.

How does Mercurial (or any other distributed version control) deal with this? Or are they unusable for such huge projects?

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