Seemant, it’s not so much that I don’t buy the concept (I do, honestly :), it’s more that implementation wise, I see it as being a pita to get going. Great once off and running, but still a pita to start towards. After all these years, if anything else Gentoo has taught me that our fellow devs will resist that which isn’t quick, painless, and quick. Especially quick.
Hence my “filtered” approach – leave the tree untouched, but give the illusion of multiple overlays using filters on which part of the tree you want to see. I can’t remember if this was in a comment or on irc, but i think it was beandog ian that boiled it down to three kinds of views – base, desktop, and server, and everything else i said in my last post is really just fluff (I disagree a bit, but really the concept is the core of it). No, this doesn’t solve the problem with the size of the tree – but if most users are only synch’ing up the filtered portions that they are interested in, then the apparent size of the tree is minimized (and so is the bandwidth that they’re synchs are using).
because i don’t toss enough crazy thoughts out at once – imagine being able to sync base daily, but only synching up the desktop filter once a week, and games once a month. ooooohhh….i think i like that…not just filtering which parts of the tree you synch against, but how often. that would be, like, cool.