Can I get a tip snapshot of a mercurial repository, without doing a complete clone?

Question

Say I have a repository on another machine whose entire history is to big to clone locally. If I have no intention of submitting any changes back to that repository, there's no reason that I shouldn't be able to just take a snapshot of the tip. Is there a way to do this, or am I going to find myself working around this with an rsync hack or something similar?

If it helps, in my case, the remote repository is provided by mercurial-server through an ssh tunnel.

Answer 1

You can use hg archive to create an unversioned archive for any revision. It does not work with ssh URL, so you'd have to run it on the remote host then scp the archive back.

Answer 2

The standard CGI script for Mercurial lets you download zip and tarballs for any revision. See the web.allow_archive setting. You can also see this with hg serve, which runs the same code as the CGI script underneath.