[repoman] conversation starter

[Paul Mattal]

Essien Ita Essien wrote:
> Normally SVN and CVS have a repo root and then modules, and for DSCMs 
> like hg, you can usually only clone/pull the root. So I would guess that 
> we'd have repo's arranged like:

I was thinking of the "package is king" approach in general, meaning
that the structure ends up flat:

/package1
/package2
/package3

Maybe we have package category directories at the top level, maybe not.

In any case, the nice part of being SCM agnostic is that we don't have
to decide this simultaneously, and we can try several things and see
what works best.

One particular point to consider, though, that could be a stumbling
block: building the repo, then, requires operations proportional to the
number of packages in the repo. For instance, for subversion, you would
need to do "svn export" on each package directory separately, pulling
the exact required version. That might be very slow for large
repositories. Even if it worked acceptably well for svn repositories, it
might not for other types of repositories.

- P