newbie question: release only a few (most recent) revision of repository, but keep full history for myself. Possible?

[Hans Fangohr]

Greetings,

another query: I have a project that has been running for 8 years now  
(in cvs) and want to convert to hg. The conversion worked fine, so  
now I have the data in a mercurial repository Due to a change of  
people working on this, I have three things I would like to achieve:

1. I would like to have a repository that contains the complete  
repository for all those years, plus future changes (let's call this  
the 'main' branch).


2. I would like to give the most recent snap shot to other parties  
(as a hg repository, let's call this 'latest_version' for now) to  
work on. They do not need the history of the project (in fact, I  
would rather keep the history to my self if possible). Also: there  
have been some fairly large commits in the past which have later been  
removed again, so it would also be of practical value not to have to  
farm out the complete history.


3. I would like to integrate the work of the other collaborators (who  
have only the 'latest_version' repository to clone from, and to  
extend) into the 'main' branch (by pulling from their work or  
something like this).

I realise that this is not a standard situation and am not sure  
whether hg can do it.

I have tried a few things but didn't get very far, so I thought I'd  
ask the experts at this point.


Many thanks,

Hans