Just try to clone Mercurial repo (Firefox) and roll back in history to specific commit. Let me tell you beforehand - it is (at least used to be) impossible. What you could do is to "clone it again" up to specified point. You have to do it somewhere else on a filesystem just to needlessly spoil disk space and you end up having the same sources at least twice. When I asked why I got handwaving arguments about code history being sacred, which is of course nonsense. If it was so... in Git I'd make another branch and rewind to commit I care about without wasting another 25gigs of disk. How can be this achieved in mercurial these days (without waste)? Back in days I wanted to do some work specifically on Firefox, and those steps were the only I could come up with after a lot of searching and asking questions, and because of Mercurial I gave up, to me it felt like it was a high entry barrier on purpose.
Just try to clone Mercurial repo (Firefox) and roll back in history to specific commit. Let me tell you beforehand - it is (at least used to be) impossible. What you could do is to "clone it again" up to specified point. You have to do it somewhere else on a filesystem just to needlessly spoil disk space and you end up having the same sources at least twice. When I asked why I got handwaving arguments about code history being sacred, which is of course nonsense. If it was so... in Git I'd make another branch and rewind to commit I care about without wasting another 25gigs of disk. How can be this achieved in mercurial these days (without waste)? Back in days I wanted to do some work specifically on Firefox, and those steps were the only I could come up with after a lot of searching and asking questions, and because of Mercurial I gave up, to me it felt like it was a high entry barrier on purpose.
So, no my friend, a lot better wins time.