[Monotone-devel] Nested projects in workspace

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

The manual seems to say that monotone takes the "one tree" approach --
there is a top (root) directory for the project, and everything under
that is assumed to be part of the project.

In the EROS and Coyotos projects, we have found that this structure
doesn't work for us. Several other OpenCM users have the same issues. I
will describe one of the use cases below, but first let me describe the
issue:

ISSUE

What we need is to be able to set up projects in subdirectories within
the workspace. For example, we need to be able to do:

   proj1-dir/dir1
            /dir2
            /proj2-dir

In OpenCM, we identify this case by noticing the presence of a .opencm/
subdirectory under the project root directory. This is analogous to the
_MTN/ directory in monotone. When we are recursing up to find the
project root, we stop at any directory D such that D/.opencm/ exists.

When we are walking the workspace tree, and we are recursing into a
directory D, we ignore the directory entirely if there exists a
subdirectory D/.opencm/

Does monotone already handle this, or does it have something analogous?
Depending on the answer, would you consider a patch to add this behavior
or (if it already exists) clarify this part of the documentation?

USE CASE:

The use case that I know best is the one for the EROS tree. Our
workspace tree has a basic directory structure, and within that there
are places where users can introduce their own "projects" but still live
within the EROS master build system. The issue is that their projects
are independent of ours for configuration management purposes, but must
live within the common tree.

So far, we have been able to organize the tree in such a way that
third-party projects have a single top-level root directory, so all we
needed to do to support this in OpenCM was sensitize the client to the
possibility that a subdirectory might contain its own project.


shap