Best practice for using one mercurial project in another

Question

What are the best practices for using one mercurial project in another? I've got a django app that I'm working on, but I'm also using mercurial to version control a website that uses that app. I've looked at mercurial subrepositories, but apparently this is considered a "feature of last resort". Is there a good way of doing what I want to do, or do I just have to copy the code from my app into my website repo when I want to update to a new version of my app?

Answer 1

In your specific case I like to let pip handle my django application dependencies: http://guide.python-distribute.org/pip.html#installing-from-a-vcs

We have in our "website" repo a requirements.txt and our deploy does a pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt That pulls the latest from the repo and installes it into the application's virtual env. This gives nice flexibility and separation while leaving the package management up to pip. With those VCS urls in pip you can point to a specific tag or branch too if you want different sites using different revisions from the same underlying repo.

pip also has a -e /path/to/file mode for pointing to an "editable" clone that's outside the website repo, which would work too, but I've not tried it.

That said, if you think subrepos fit your workflow better by all means use them. They work just fine, but people often get hung up on the workflow constraints ("What do you mean I can't commit my parent repo w/o also committing in the subrepo?!")