Is clone the only way to get contents of a Mercurial repository?

Question

I am trying to get the sources for Netbeans IDE by running:

hg clone http://hg.netbeans.org/main/

However, this seems to be taking forever, and it does not give me any kind of status which tells me the percent of download that's complete. If a lose my internet connection, I have to start all over again.

I realize that Mercurial is a distributed source control system, and perhaps the 'clone' command is taking this long because it is getting the entire history of all the files (is this correct?)

When we get sources from CVS we usually get the source without the entire history. Is it possible to do something like this with Mercurial?

Answer 1

May be a clone -verbose would give you more details about what goes wrong ?

C:\netbeans-src>hg clone --verbose http://hg.netbeans.org/main
destination directory: main
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes

If there is no errors, you may consider a Shallow clone to not pull the entire history from a server, but only a subset starting at a given revision.
As mentioned by Ry4an, this is an "alpha extension", and not yet a perennial solution.

Answer 2

Mercurial's hgweb can be configured to allow download of snapshots, e.g.,

Make sure that your repository's .hg/hgrc file (or the /home/user/.hgrc file) contains the allow_archive setting:

[web]
allow_archive = gz, zip, bz2

This example illustrates how gzip, zip and bzip2 archive formats can be supported. As a result, links should appear in the Web interface corresponding to these archive types.

However, it does not look like the repository you are trying to download allows this mode of operation. You might request that they add it.