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[http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/bts/issue105 Issue105 in the BTS] covers partial checkouts and suggests using -X/-I on clone or checkout. [[http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/bts/issue105|Issue105 in the BTS]] covers partial checkouts and suggests using -X/-I on clone or checkout.

Problem: on large repos, it would be useful to be able to do a partial clone and/or checkout

Proposal: add a new file like .hgignore to the .hg/ directory that specifies which files should be ignored for clone/checkout.

Issue105 in the BTS covers partial checkouts and suggests using -X/-I on clone or checkout.

To implement:

  • pick a sensible name for this file (BryanOSullivan suggests ignoremissing)
  • teach localrepo to use this filtering where appropriate (checkout, pull)
  • teach changegroup to choke if someone attempts to pull a changeset from us with a file we don't have

Not to be confused with TrimmingHistory, which trims in the history tree, not the directory tree.


Comments from Matt Mackall:

> > How hard would this be to implement?

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd rate it about a 7.

The simplest approach is probably "allow cloning of subdirectories". Here's how that would work:

  • add a file called "subdir" to .hg/store containing the subdirectory we're cloning
  • do a clone as usual, but don't write out revlogs that aren't in subdir
  • adjust the functions dealing with paths (localrepo.wjoin, etc.) appropriately
  • teach various things (checkout, status, etc.) to skip files outside the subdirectory
  • teach merge not allow merging when files outside the subdirectory conflict

Merging is the tricky part, and I expect there's a gotcha or two buried in there.


RyanF: I would also like to see a filtering option or partial clone, but with support for the include and exclude (-I, -X). We are writing an open source Mavenesque (but much simpler) tool that manages very large products and dependencies involving multiple repositories. It requires a Dependencies.lookup in the root of any repos module but it does not seem possible for us to checkout a single file with hg.

It would be fine for our needs if an interim solution checked out the subset of files in a read-only mode.


trisk: ConvertExtension appears to already provide the ability to perform partial clones by generating a new full repository, as described under "Converting from Mercurial".

  • You can use this, today, without waiting for additional subdir support to arrive
  • For the same reason, it probably doesn't handle merging


CategoryNewFeatures

PartialClone (last edited 2012-10-25 20:50:28 by mpm)