Is there any distributed revision control system that supports partial checkout/clone?

Question

As far as I know all distributed revision control systems require you to clone the whole repository. For this reason is it not wise to put huge amounts of content into one s

Answer 1

In distributed rcs the history of a file (or a chunk of content) is a directed acyclic graph, so why can't you just clone this single DAG instead of the set of all graphs in the a repository?

At least in Git, the DAG representing the repository history applies to the whole repository, not just a single file. Each commit object points to a "tree" object which represents the entire state of the repository at that time.

Git 1.7 supports "sparse checkouts", which allow you to restrict the size of your working copy. The entire repository data is still cloned, however.