Talk of Shallow Clone Extension
There had been some talk about work on an unofficial Shallow Clone extension for Mercurial. This extension would function similarly to the git clone --depth X extension, but would provide better push support and merge safety.
Basically, it would let users clone a smaller sub-set of history to save time and space, but still benefit from all the other benefits of hg. After all, not all developers need the whole history back to changeset 0 to be productive.
Links to Discussions
The Shallow Clone extension is discussed on hg's site. They also put up a status page and a plan for implementation. Furthermore, they repeatedly mention that they got a Google Summer of Code (gsoc) intern to work on the extension in the summer of 2010.
Even still, I can't seem to find any up to date status on this feature. I found two bitbucket projects that may be related to it, but neither has seen any recent commits: hg-shallow-clone and hg-shallow.
Is Shallow Clone Still Under Development?
Does anyone know that status of this extension? Is it still being worked on somewhere by someone or is it truly abandoned? What ever came of that GSoC work?
It is not under development. Various people from outside the Mercurial project have made attempts, but none have come to fruition, and the Mercurial project itself considers things like the largefiles extension a better solution for keeping repository clone sizes down.