If you use git you can do this with the --depth n option when you pull it down $ git clone --depth 1 https://blah.com/foo/qux https://blah.com/foo/qux will pu

If you use git you can do this with the --depth n option when you pull it down $ git clone --depth 1 https://blah.com/foo/qux https://blah.com/foo/qux will pull down just one step in the history. Unfortunately I believe that mercurial requires a large amount of the history to reconstruct the current version in the tree. Last time I tried to pull down firefox I was unable to because I was working on a system with 1GB of ram and the firefox repository requires at least >2GB to pull down properly -- I believe this is a fundamental defect in mercurial, but I might be mistaken.