Documentation at Mercurial wiki says following about bare repositories:
“Although this is a minor issue, Mercurial can obviously handle a
bare repository; that is, a repository without a working copy. In Git
you need a configuration option for that, whereas in Hg you only need
to check out the null revision, like this:“hg update null
The null revision is similar to the empty state you have when you have just done hg init. It is the parent of revision 0 (and the second parent of all non-merge revisions) and by updating back to it you again get an empty working copy.
The link may look ironic:
- https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/GitConcepts