Cloning to a downgraded repository - examples don't seem to work

[Chris Green]

In the section "Missing Requirement" it has the following example for
cloning a repository into a downgraded copy:-

    hg --config format.dotencode=0 clone --pull repoA repoB

I have been trying this but it doesn't seem to be working, maybe I'm
misunderstanding what it does (quite likely!).

To get down to details, I have a mercurial repository in ~/.cfg and in
~/.cfg/.hg/requires it has:-

    share-safe

I want to clone this repository so that I can use it with some older
versions of mercurial that don't have share-safe, so I did:-

    hg --config format.share-safe=0 clone --pull .cfg .newcfg

However the resulting repository in .newcfg still has 'share-safe' in
the requires file and older mercurials give the error message about
not having 'share-safe'.

So, what am I doing wrong?



While I'm about it can someone explain what the --pull option does in
the above command please.  I tried it without the --pull and it still
worked but the resulting .newcfg repository used much less disk space
than the old one.  Does it not copy deleted files or something?

-- 
Chris Green