Mercurial: how do I create a new repository containing a subrange of revisions from an existing repo?

Question

I have a repo with subrepos, with a long history. At some point the main subrepo became fully self-contained (doesn't depend on other sister subrepos).

I don't care anymore about the history of the whole thing before the main subrepo became self-contained. So I want to start a new repo that contains just what the subrepo has in it from that moment on. If possible, please describe in terms of TortoiseHg commands.

Answer 1

You probably want to make use of mercurial's convert extension. You can specify revisions to be converted, paths, branches and files to include or exclude in the newly-created repository.

hg convert from-path new-repo

Convert is a default extension which just needs activation.

Answer 2

You might be able to weed out any other changesets you don't need by using the hg strip command.

It will entirely remove changesets (and their ancestors) from a repository. Most likely you would want to make a fresh clone and then work on stripping it down.

One potential pitfall is that the final stripped repo would still have shared parentage with the original; therefore the potential exists for someone to accidentally pull down again changesets which were stripped.

The hg convert command (noted in another answer) does not have this downside.