Copy a single branch to a different repository

Question

We have this mercurial remote repository (lets call it repo01):

A --- B --- C --- D (default)
       \
        --- E --- F (other)

We need to grant access to the E-F branch to our client, but not the A-D one. On the other hand we need to keep track of changes to the E-F branch. So I was thinking that if we could somehow copy the E-F branch to a different remote repository, we could achieve just that.

So the other remote repository (let's call it repo02) would look like this:

E --- F (other)

Then we would work with both repositories and the client would just work with repo02. The question is, can this actually be done and if yes how?

Answer 1

Your question is the combination of these two questions:

• Mercurial clone from a branch
• Can I clone just the latest changesets of a repository instead of the entire history?

If you were going to copy the entire history of the branch other then you would just need to provide the -b option to hg clone:

hg clone http://your/repo -b other

For your purposes, you must combine it with some way of creating a shallow clone, which Mercurial doesn't natively support. Look at the extensions suggested in the top two answers to the second question above (https://bitbucket.org/facebook/remotefilelog and https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ShallowClone).