hg way to get just a bundle of a remote repository without applying it

[Avi Kelman]

On Wed, 2018-01-31 at 09:58 -0500, Avi Kelman wrote:
> On Tue, 2018-01-30 at 11:54 -0600, Kevin Bullock wrote:
> > > On Jan 25, 2018, at 18:35, Avi Kelman <patcherton.fixesthings at gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > > 
> > > Hi all. I'm looking for how to do basically the first part of hg clone,
> > > where a
> > > bundle file is retrieved over the wire from a remote server, but then
> > > just
> > > saving that bundle file
> > 
> > You can use 'hg incoming --bundle FILE' for this. You'll need to run it
> > inside of an empty local hg repo though.
> 
> Ok, this sort of works, but...
> 
> After downloading, the process for `hg incoming --bundle bundlefile --quiet
> htt
> ps://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/` fills up a whopping 12GB of RAM which
> is
> catastrophic to the system.
> 
> The whole bundle is only ~5GB uncompressed, and mozilla specifically premakes
> compressed bundles for clone to fetch quickly.
> 
> I'm really looking to just save what clone is downloading and then stop
> there,
> even if it means a python script. :\


Amendment: Ideally I'd hope to be able to specify a bundlespec too (eg gzip-
v2), but that's definitely a far lower priority than not having the machine
lock up because it starts hitting gigabytes of swap.

Avi