Can I clone just the latest changesets of a repository instead of the entire history?

Question

I have to work with an hg repository that has millions of lines of code and hundreds of thousands of changesets. As you can imagine, this really slows down mercurial and To

Answer 1

No you can't. That's called a "Shallow Clone" and it's not implemented/supported. Millions of lines of code and thousands of changesets isn't particularly large, and once you've cloned it down once almost every action should be near instantaneous.

Further, the compressed binary deltas in the .hg directory are usually smaller than the entirety of the uncompressed code in the working directory, so the space savings shouldn't be substantial either.

Once you've cloned the repo once, make sure to do any further clones on the same machine from your local clone, and you'll never have to wait for the whole repo to clone again.