Partial clone with Git and Mercurial

by

In Git land you are talking about three different types of partial clones:

  • shallow clones: I want history from revision point X onward.

    Use git clone --depth <n> <url> for that, but please remember that shallow clones are somewhat limited in interacting with other repositories. You would be able to generate patches and send them via email.

  • partial clone by filepath: I want all revision history history in some directory /path.

    Not possible in Git. With modern Git though you can have sparse checkout, i.e. you have whole history but you check out (have in working area) only subset of all files.

  • cloning only selected branch: I want to clone only one branch (or selected subset of branches).

    Possible, and

    before git 1.7.10 not simple: you would need to do what clone does manually, i.e. git init [<directory>], then git remote add origin <url>, edit .git/config replacing * in remote.origin.fetch by requested branch (probably ‘master’), then git fetch .

    as of git 1.7.10 git clone offers the --single-branch option which seems like it was added just for this purpose, and seems pretty easy.

    Note however that because branches usually share most of their history, the gain from cloning only a subset of branches might be smaller than you think.

You can also do a shallow clone of only selected subset of branches.

If you know how people will want to break things down by filepath (multiple projects in the same repository) you can use submodules (sort of like svn:externals) to pre-split the repo into separately cloneable portions.

More Related Contents:

  1. Distributed Version Control Systems and the Enterprise – a Good mix? [closed]
  2. Git and Mercurial – Compare and Contrast
  3. Merging: Hg/Git vs. SVN
  4. What is the Difference Between Mercurial and Git?
  5. How to export revision history from mercurial or git to cvs?
  6. How to search through all Git and Mercurial commits in the repository for a certain string?
  7. Git interoperability with a Mercurial Repository
  8. Convert Mercurial project to Git [duplicate]
  9. Hg: How to do a rebase like git’s rebase
  10. Using Git how do I find changes between local and remote
  11. Mercurial (and, I guess Git) with Dropbox: any drawbacks?
  12. Transferring legacy code base from cvs to distributed repository (e.g. git or mercurial). Suggestions needed for initial repository design [closed]
  13. Is there a way to use a Mercurial repository as Git submodule?
  14. Git equivalents of most common Mercurial commands?
  15. Diffing between two entire directories/projects in hg or git?
  16. Break a previous commit into multiple commits
  17. Visualizing branch topology in Git
  18. Difference between git checkout –track origin/branch and git checkout -b branch origin/branch
  19. How to recover Git objects damaged by hard disk failure?
  20. Moving Git repository content to another repository preserving history
  21. How can I list all tags in my Git repository by the date they were created?
  22. How to exclude file only from root folder in Git
  23. Visual Studio Code cannot detect installed git
  24. How to handle a large git repository?
  25. gitolite push error -> remote: ENV GL_RC not set
  26. How to merge specific files from Git branches
  27. Git refuses to reset/discard files
  28. How does git track source code moved between files?
  29. How do I deal with corrupted Git object files?
  30. How do I write a batch file which opens the GitBash shell and runs a command in the shell?

Leave a Comment