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Can I clone part of a Mercurial repository?

Asked 2009-11-16T21:34:33.500
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Is it possible to clone part of a Mercurial repository? Let's say the repository is quite large, or contains multiple projects, or multiple branches. Can I clone only part of the repository?

E.g. in Subversion, you might have trunk and branches. If I only want to get trunk (or one of the branches) I can just request [project]/trunk. If I clone the hg repo I'll get trunk and all of the branches. This might be a lot of information I don't want. Can I avoid getting this?

Alternatively, if I want to have multiple projects in one hg repo, how should I do this? I.e. so that I might just get one of the projects and ignore the others.

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@Nick

"E.g. in Subversion, you might have trunk and branches. If I only want to get trunk (or one of the branches) I can just request [project]/trunk. If I clone the hg repo I'll get trunk and all of the branches. This might be a lot of information I don't want. Can I avoid getting this?"

Absolutely. Just use hg clone -r <branch> and get only the branch you want. If you have lots of branches, you need a -r <branch> for each one. <branch> doesn't have to be a named branch: you can simply have multiple unnamed heads (or named heads using bookmark, though those still aren't perfect, because currently they don't show up with push/pull/clone).

Keep in mind that in DVCSes, Mercurial among them, branches are often short-lived and merged back into each other frequently. If you pull a branch you will still get the common history it has with any other branches.

answered 2009-11-17T21:19:33.973

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