Question

Can I clone a Kiln "repository group" in a single step? Ideally, using tortoise-hg...

Answer 1

No, you can't. But it could be a cool Mercurial extension for Kiln users.

UPDATE: I have just released KilnClone Mercurial extension to make it possible to clone Kiln project, repository group and even all projects from specified Kiln account. Detailed information and source code you can find here.

Answer 2

You can do this using my kiln-local-backup script by passing the --limit command-line option.

For example, if you had a project called Microsoft Office with a group under that called Excel, and repositories under that called Mac and Windows, you could clone all repositories under the Excel group like this:

C:\> python kiln-local-backup.py --limit 'Microsoft Office/Excel' --update C:\Destination

This script is designed for backup, but it creates a normal clone of your project, so it should be useful even if you aren’t using it strictly for backup.

The --update option, not normally used for backups, updates/checks out a working copy of the repository. In other words, it works exactly like typing hg clone myrepository at the command-line.

Answer 3

Hello Roddy. Are your repository groups fairly standard across the groups in terms of the repo names they contain?

You could write an sh (Linux) or .bat (windows) script to take the project and the group parameters and then hg clone the repos; forming the repo URLs off the project and group and the known standardized repo names. 

If they differ, then you'd need customize a script for each repo group.  Once written though it makes cloning many repos simpler.