Question

Now that Kiln supports sub-repositories, it would be great to get a real-world example from the Kiln creators or other users on how they use them. There is a fair bit about sub-repositories available on the web, but having some insight on how Kiln specifically supports sub-repositories, how Fog Creek and others use them, and their workflow with them would be great!

Answer 1

We're only really just starting to use subrepositories "for real" internally, so while I could talk about exactly what we're doing, I'd rather wait until we're at least somewhat confident that we're getting close to a best-practice-type area. The short answer, though, based on the projects that are using subrepositories:

1. Libraries that are designed for reuse (e.g., our fork of Migrator.NET) go into their own repositories
2. Programs that need those libraries include them via subrepositories
3. Intermittently, we upgrade the library to a newer version, test to make sure it hasn't broken anything in the parent project, and then commit that.

This takes advantage of Mercurial's pinning of subrepository versions to ensure that your clone will always work and to avoid having libraries simply copied around.