Reported by Unknown User, May 2, 2005

(This entry was imported from the savannah tracker, original 
location: https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/index.php?12933)

As I mentioned on the iRC the current state of design requires 
someone to pull a _whole_ history of a project even if s/he's only 
want to work on recent versions. This isn't really just a problem of 
network traffic (eg. "you don't have to worry, it only pulls 
the whole shebang once") but disk space too (monotone repo 
currently above 45MB, and it's a small project; mozilla and linux 
kernel were mentioned, both possessing extensive amounts of 
historical revisions).

Partial pulls naturally would require a bit caution at handling, and 
maybe some functions could result "I can't do what you asked 
for, please pull more history"... I am not even sure whether it 
can be done or not. But I am pretty sure I wouldn't be able to store 
mozilla in monotone, full history on my disk, even when "disk 
space is cheap" (unless it became free of charge :)).

At least I'd prefer to know why this couldn't, shouldn't or mustn't 
be done. :) [And what are the alternatives for people with limited 
bandwidth, disk space or patience (pulling/verifying monotone still 
required 90 minutes, dunno how long kernel would take :))]

monotone version:
-----------------
monotone 0.18 (base revision: 
e8c9e4eb0534a4c6e538935576330de34ec42052)