At my organization, we'd like to switch from using CVS to Mercurial for a variety of reasons. We've done a lot of investigation when trying to determine how we should organize our Hg repositories based on what we have in our codebase and how we tend to work. We've come up with satisfactory answers to most of our questions, but there's one point that's stumping us a little, and it's driving me mad because the most convenient way to organize the repo for our workflow just seems like the wrong way to go from a conceptual standpoint. I'm trying to figure out whether our perception of how this is "supposed" to work is wrong, or whether we're just bumping up against a legitimate feature gap in the available tooling.
Primarily we maintain a medium sized codebase consisting of a suite of applications that get all get released in the same package. Conceptually you can divide our code into three categories:
- Shared code
- Application code for our primary suite (uses the shared code)
- Miscellaneous small utilities that are infrequently maintained (uses the shared code)
This doesn't seem unusual to me, but I want to stress the point that we maintain the application code and the shared code at the same time and always want them to be bleeding edge with respect to each other. That is, we want all our application builds to always use the latest version and the same version of the shared code. We frequently add to or modify application code and shared code at the same time. Currently, the shared code is in one CVS module, and the applications are all in their own separate modules. The shared code and application modules are checked out such that the shared code gets built once and then linked into each application. We frequently do cvs commits that include changes across shared and application modules at once. We would really like to keep that ability.
I understand that commits in Hg are atomic within repositories -- tha