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 :))]