We have a big Hg repo, hosted in a remote location. Performing an hg clone from this master repo takes about an hour. What we generally do to speed things up is to hg serve a local repo of a colleague, hg clone http://colleague-machine, and then change de default path in .hg/hgrc to the address of the master repo.
This is all well and good, but this workaround has one drawback: because we are cloning the repo of a developer, some draft commits can be cloned along with the public ones. Moreover, these commits become public in the cloned repo, making them indistinguishable from the others.
One possibility I found is to make the developer's repo non publishing, in order to preserve the phases of the commits and to remove them later on. Another possibility is to create a bundle containing only the public commits, instead of cloning directly.
These methods are more complex to explain and to document. Is there an option for hg clone to clone only the public commits? I tried with hg clone -r "public()", but clone does not take a revset, just a regular commit identifer. Alternatively, is there an option for hg serve to serve only the public commits?