Lazy remote clones?

[Jesse Glick]

Andreas Axelsson wrote:
> I was thinking that perhaps it would be possible to replace 
> historical content with pointers to a “master” repository.

If you're interested in a somewhat messy solution that works with 
current versions of Hg:

http://wiki.netbeans.org/HgExternalBinaries

The insight here is to use Hg's encode and decode hooks, so that the 
repository actually keeps just hashes for big binary files, which get 
replaced with the real thing in the working copy. There is a local file 
cache which you can blow away at will. The server side requires static 
HTTP serving plus a simple CGI script.