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

I hope one of these RCS's will add narrow clone capability. My understanding is that the architecture of GIT (changes/moves tracked across the whole repo) makes this very difficult.

Bazaar prides itself on supporting many different types of workflows. Lack of narrow clone capability prohibits an SVN/CVS like workflow in bzr/hg/git, so I'm hoping they'll be motivated to find some way to do this.

New features shouldn't come at the expense of basic functionality, like the ability to fetch a single file/directory from the repo. The "distributed" feature of modern rcs's is "cool," but in my opinion discourages good development practices (frequent merges / continuous integration). These new RCS's all seem to lack very basic functionality. Even SVN without real branching/tagging support seemed like a step backwards from CVS imo.