No I mean I want
petsc/releases/petsc-3.1 petsc/tools/parsing/BarrysNewHTMLMunger
Sounds like you want a "traditional filesystem hierarchy" and like I said before, your request will fall on deaf ears. This is the same request that mercurial-dev gets from people switching from subversion: "I only want to check out a subdirectory, not the whole project!" to which the common response is, "You should rethink your 'project' if you only want a subdirectory." Take a look at subrepos and subpaths: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Subrepository http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/SubrepoRemappingPlan and maybe projrc: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ProjrcExtension?action=show&redirect=Subpa... For what it's worth, I never liked petsc-dev being in a different folder than petsc-3.x. It is not confusing to have them all like so: petsc/petsc-3.1 petsc/petsc-dev