Is it possible to checkout a single directory from a Mercurial (HG) repository?

Question

So, I'm trying to checkout just the TestNG plugin from the Netbeans contrib repository. (Or is it module? I'm new to Mercurial, so I don't really know the lingo yet.)

When I run the following command...

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

...I get the entire repository, which contains all of the the contrib plug-ins. Is it possible to just pull this location?

http://hg.netbeans.org/main/contrib/file/tip/testng/

Thanks!

Answer 1

This concept is called "narrow cloning" and no, it's not possible at the moment in Mercurial.

It's on the radar of some of us that contribute to Mercurial but it's a hard problem to solve. For example:

• How do you calculate the hash of any new commits you make if you don't have all of the files in the repo?
• What happens if you try to view the history of a file in contrib/testng if that file was moved from another folder?