Can I get a tip snapshot of a mercurial repository, without doing a complete clone?

Question

Say I have a repository on another machine whose entire history is to big to clone locally. If I have no intention of submitting any changes back to that repository, there's no reason that I shouldn't be able to just take a snapshot of the tip. Is there a way to do this, or am I going to find myself working around this with an rsync hack or something similar?

If it helps, in my case, the remote repository is provided by mercurial-server through an ssh tunnel.

Answer 1

The standard CGI script for Mercurial lets you download zip and tarballs for any revision. See the web.allow_archive setting. You can also see this with hg serve, which runs the same code as the CGI script underneath.