Couldn't you just have a separate build-only repository?

Sure, but you'd still have to manage that repository which would probably require a non-trivial amount of code and wouldn't support building/testing topic branches. Furthermore unless you linked the build directories in some way, which this solution does, you'd end up chronically overbuilding.

Doesn't this use lot of disk space?

Sure, some. But I think in most competitions between disk space and improved productivity, productivity always wins. That not withstanding:

1. Little known fact: when run git clone and specify the remote as a "local" repository, git uses hardlinks, if possible, for it's objects database. This means, that you're only copying the source tree, indeed there are two or three copies of the source tree lying around as it is.

2. Most build processes aren't terribly space intensive: the second checkout is only 7 megs, our .git directory is 7.3 megs (packed), which translates to a 5.4 meg source directory. By contrast the output of a full build of a branch is about 150 megabytes plus production staging.

At least in our case, the additional space costs are effectively trivial both given the size of contemporary hard drives and scale of other size requirements.

Source code may be larger: the MongoDB source tree has a 16 megabyte source tree (not counting 50+ megs of in-tree third party libraries) that becomes tens of gigabytes with build artifacts. Even so, given a project of this scale space costs wouldn't be hard to justify. Having said that, most software build problems (that I'm aware of,) don't face this kind of contention, so it's pretty irrelevant.

This doesn't make anything faster, so how does it help?

Indeed it probably makes things slower (tests are not yet conclusive,) but it means that any build process can happen entirely in the background and without possibly affecting your current work.

Sometimes the best way to optimize an inefficient process is to apply intelligence and actually make something slow faster. This is great, but it's also quite hard (and time consuming) and often intelligence can only increase performance by a few percentage points. As a caveat, always make sure that things aren't slow for a dumb and simple reason, but if an improvement isn't obvious or there isn't a simple easy to fix source of slowness, intelligence is often overrated in this regard.

Other times, perhaps even often, the best way to optimize an inefficient process is to make it not matter that it's slow. Some things take a long time to do, and while it's great to do things synchronously, it's not always a real requirement.

This is a smart hack that falls into the second category: if builds are going to take 4 to 6 minutes to run, I don't want that to prevent things from happening in that time. I don't want to have to think about coordinating activities around a given period of dead time: this hack solves this handily.

Four to 6 minutes isn't that long, but it's starting to get to a point where it's too long to maintain focus on a task and wait around for a build to finish, particularly for the longer ends.

With this I think we could tolerate ~15 minute builds without really causing a problem. Beyond that and we might need to reopen this case.