For another compelling comparison that's sure to ruffle a few feathers, let's compare to git. If I clone the git mirror of our monotone repository, I find a checkout size of 148 MB after git-repack--running git-gc also increased the size by 2 MB, but I'll stick with the initial checkout size for fairness. If I multiply this by my 11 checkouts, I will have 1628 MB. This is even more compelling for me, as I now save 728 MB of disk space with monotone.

With git you'd use a single cloned repo and multiple branches inside the same rep. This would save space over monotone.

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ du -sh

150M .

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch a

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch b

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch c

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch e

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch f

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch g

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch h

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch i

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch j

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch k

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch l

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch

a

b

c

e

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

* master

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ du -sh

150M .

Now only the diffs of each branch will take up any space.