The concept itself is pretty simple. When using a DVCS with a project with a long history, each and every user has a copy of this history. Now much of this history may be ancient (for some definition of ancient, 6 months, 6 years, whatever). Most developers will never have a need to go into the ancient history of a project, and so a truncated history is fine as long as their branches that they create are still mergable with the main repository.
Here's how it could play out:
- Bob wants to work on the fooix project to fix a minor bug, this is Bob's first look at the fooix source. The fooix project has been around for eons and has a huge history. Bob doesn't care about the history, he just wants to do his simple fix (think a typo).
- Bob grabs the fooix trunk branch but only gets enough history to create the working files.
- Bob makes his fix, and publishes his branch for the fooix developers to grab.
The advantage here is that when Bob grabs his branch, he is only getting just enough history to work, and so his resulting repository is smaller and faster.
Commands that worked by inspecting the history would stop at the repository's horizon and say something like "and that's all I've got". Obviously there'd need to be a way to say "go and get me another 4 months of history" or even "ok, now I'm really interested, get me the complete history".
This is conceptually different from a lazy loading or stacked repository as there is an explicit horizon where normal history commands stop.
So lazyweb, the question I have is this: "Is this a worthwhile feature in a DVCS tool?"
