I have some uncommitted changes C in my repo. I would like remember that changes in any way and get clean code (without that changes), make a little change and commit it. Now, I would like to recover my changes C and continue working on it. I know that I can deal with it using a lot of ways, but that ways are irritating. How to do it using mercurial?
So, to be more precise I need something like a stack:
Working on the code. Remember changes C on the stack.
hg update --clean
Make a change C2. Commit it.
Pop from stack a changeset C and work on it. But, now the repositorium contains committed change C2 and uncommitted C. It may cause that I need to merge but I expect that this merge will be invisible from the point of view repositorium.
While you certainly can work with mercurial queues, there's IMHO an easier and nicer way: change your default phase to secret and work with those commits like normal commits. Commits in phase secret are mutable and will not be exposed by push and pull commands acting on the repo.
This process has the advantage that you do not need to change your workflow - whether you work with commits you want to share (phase draft or public), or whether you still consider them work-in-progress and keep them locally only.
Additionally if you enable the evolve extension, you gain several benefits: it becomes even easier to amend commits and evolve (thus rebase) all child commits which depend on it.
The big advantage over the use of the mercurial queues is that you can make full use of the inbuild merge features - thus if the underlaying code changes, rebasing the new changesets is WAY easier and natural than using queues and hg shelve.
See the introduction to hg phases and changeset evolution which needs the evolve extension.
Enable the Mercurial Queues extension in your mercurial.ini or .hgrc file:
[extensions]
mq =
Then you can,
hg qnew save # save work in progress as a temporary commit
hg qpop # remove that commit
Make some more changes....
hg ci -m "new changes"
hg qpush # push the saved commit back.
hg qfinish -a # convert all temp commits to full commits.
You can also enable the shelve extension:
[extensions]
shelve =
Then you can:
hg shelve # "put away" current uncommitted changes.
*do other work*
hg unshelve # bring the shelved changes back
See hg help mq and hg help shelve for more info.
I've tried shelve, mq as described in other answers but to be honest I generally stick with:
hg diff > saved.patch # This assumes you've not aliased diff to a UI!!!
hg update -C
.. work
hg patch -f --no-commit saved.patch # I alias this for less typing
.. continue
Less book-keeping involved, its never gone wrong unlike shelve, and the patch itself is more easily portable. Just use common-sense and either make sure the patch applies fully, or use the --partial option and manually complete the patch.
Related
I cloned a project to my local directory and made a lot of changes. My current goal is to push my changed code to a new branch in the remote repository. And eventually this new branch will be merged back to default.
My problem is, because of some stupid effort in the past a few weeks to try to recover some missing files, I end up with a few branch names that I don't want being shown in public.
Here's what I have:
$hg branches
dev-v02 197:xxxxx
dev2 194:xxxxx
dev 183:xxxxx
qa 189:xxxxx
$hg branch
dev-v02
My question is, if I push my current branch dev-v02 to the remote repository by "hg push --new-branch", and this branch later get merged back to default, will the unwanted branches show up in history of default? And if so, is there a safe way to purge them?
I do NOT want to discard my changes. I just don't want the unwanted branches showing up in "hg branches" or "hg his" commands by whoever later clones the project from the remote repository. I searched online and found "hg strip" but I couldn't tell from the article if it would also remove the changes I've made. Thanks.
Edit: I just cloned my local repository by "hg clone -r 197 original-dir dest-dir" as suggested by both kevin and chessbot and now hg branches shows:
dev-02 192:xxxxx
qa 187:xxxxx (inactive)
I guess "qa" remains because I had pushed it to the remote as a QA branch and closed it later, and I just have to live with that. I will push from this new directory from now on. Thanks guys for your help.
Try hg push --new-branch -b dev-v02 to specify that you're pushing only that branch.
(See: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/help/push)
Another thing you could do: Clone the repository locally on your machine, strip out the branches you don't want, and then push that clone to the server. Then you retain your history locally without pushing it to everyone else.
It depends.
Branches are permanently associated with a commit. The branch is part of the commit, and contributes to the hash. Changing the branch of a commit in the past would alter all commit hashes from that point forward. This is quite different from Git, where a branch is little more than an ephemeral pointer to a HEAD. Such pointers are implemented in Mercurial as bookmarks.
If the unwanted branches appear on commits which are (ancestors of) commits you want to publish, there is very little you can do, short of recreating the history with all-new hashes. This could (for instance) be done with hg export and hg import, along with local cloning and (probably) a certain amount of shell scripting. More efficiently, you could use the convert extension to automate the process. Since this changes commit hashes, it will likely cause serious problems if any of the commits have already been distributed publicly.
If you have no interest in sharing the offending commits, you can simply not publish them. This can be done with selective pushing. However, since you'll always have to manually exclude those commits every time you push, it's probably safer to clone and strip (or clone selectively with the -r flag). You can then push from your partial clone with impunity. Assuming you have a sufficiently recent version of Mercurial, you can also force the commits into the secret phase, so that they will not be pushed:
hg phase -fs revisions
You don't want to use hg strip, because it permanently removes the commits from the history (see Editing History in the Mercurial wiki)
If I were you, I would close the branches instead:
hg up -C badbranch
hg commit --close-branch -m 'close badbranch, this approach never worked'
hg up -C default
(source: Pruning branches in the Mercurial wiki)
After closing a branch, hg branches doesn't show it anymore.
If you do want to see closed branches, use the -c parameter:
hg branches -c
Disadvantage:
hg his still shows closed branches.
You could use the -b parameter though, to show only the default branch:
hg his -b default
In my local repo, I have a file A and I made some changes. But I didn't want to submit this changes to remote repo. The question is if I didn't submit this changes in TortoiseHG, everytime I changed other files, A will be listed in the "changelist window".
I know, TortoiseHG has a shelve function. It can store temp files. But files in shelve will revert to origin status.
Commit the change and then modify the phase of the commit to "secret". Note that any child changesets of a secret changeset will also be secret.
hg help phases
You might want to maintain a private branch with these changes - just make the first commit to the branch secret and then periodically merge from the main branch to your private branch.
An alternative is to do the above but without making the changesets secret. This will allow pushing the branch to a central server which gets the benefits of backups, etc and also the possibility that these changes might be useful to other developers (but still not on the main branch).
Consider using Mercurial patch queues to manage local changes. With MQ you can queue up local changes and stash them out of the way for future use.
For the extension's documentation, here's the standard workflow you'd use for putting away local changes for future use:
$ hg qnew choosename
$ hg qpop
$ # ...
$ # restore
$ hg qpush
$ hg strip -k choosename
$ hg qremove choosename
There's also shelve, but I've never used it.
I'm trying to grasp the Mercurial basics so please bear with me. :) My current workflow is as follows:
do some work until I'm ready to commit or need the others' changes
pull
at this point I'd like to merge my work with the latest changesets and commit, however Mercurial insists on me committing before merging
so it goes like "commit, merge, commit" and I'm basically committing everything twice, writing the same notes in both changesets and pushing two changesets at a time
Is it intended to be so? Is it possible to have just one changeset coming from me with every merge? Is it indeed desirable?
I've read a lot of online manuals but still feel I do not have solid understanding of the process. All comments are welcome. Thanks!
EDIT: Turns out I didn't know that update could merge incoming changes with uncommitted edits.
Merging always creates a separate changeset in Mercurial.
Plus, merging is not possible as long as you have uncommitted stuff in your local repository.
So the solution is to commit first, and pull and merge afterwards.
This will always result in two changesets, not one.
(...because merging always creates a separate changeset)
But you don't commit the same stuff twice, and especially you shouldn't write the same commit message twice:
The first commit is what you actually changed ("fixed a bug in the foo bar").
The second commit is just the merge (TortoiseHG actually pre-populates the commit message with "Merge", 99% of the time I just leave it like that).
This workflow will prevent a merge in the history, but you still do a merge as noted below:
Do some work until you are ready to commit or need another's changes.
hg pull
hg update (Note: hg pull -u does this and the previous in one step.
During hg update, your uncommitted changes will be merged with the new tip of your current branch. You will still have to resolve any conflicts.
hg commit when ready.
I still recommend if you have extensive changes to commit first before pulling/merging because it is easier to start over by updating to that changeset if the merge goes badly.
Keeping the hg pull and hg update separate allows you to look at the incoming changesets and predict how the merge will go.
The reason is feels strange is that you delay your commit until you want to integrate with the others.
A big feature of distributed version control is that commits are local. Because they're local you should commit often — commit every time you have a small consistent chunk of work done. Your commits are not inflicted on others immediately so you wont interrupt them by making many small commits.
If you begin making more commits you'll see that your workflow becomes:
$ hg commit -m "Refactoring for Issue123"
$ hg commit -m "Basic functionality for Issue123"
$ hg commit -m "Fixed off-by-one error (Issue123)"
$ hg commit -m "Finished implementing Issue123"
$ hg commit -m "Added more tests for Issue123"
$ hg commit -m "Begin use new function from Issue123"
$ hg pull
$ hg merge
$ hg commit -m "Merge"
Here the ratio of merge commits to "real" commits is much more sensible.
Many people (myself included) like to use the rebase extension to avoid the merge completely. That extension linearizes the commits by faking the history so that it looks like you did your four commits after the changesets you pulled down with hg pull. The only change in workflow is that you hg rebase instead of hg merge above and then skip the final commit.
I want to completely delete a Mercurial commit as if it was never entered in the repository and move back to my prior commit.
Is this possible?
If it was your last commit and you haven't pushed it anywhere, you can do that with rollback. Otherwise, no. Not really. Time to change your passwords.
Edit: It has been pointed out that you can clone from an older revision and merge in the changes you want to keep. That's also true, unless you have pushed it to a repo you don't control. Once you push, your data is very likely to be very hard to get back.
You can try to remove mq info about your commit.
For this you need to go File->Settings->Extensions.
There check mq and restart gui.
After that just right click on unneeded commit and
ModifyHistory->Strip
To edit the history I would use the Histedit Extension extension.
hg histedit 45:c3a3a271d11c
However keep in mind this only makes sense in a situation where you have not yet pushed the commits to the public repository, you own the public repository and/or you can account for all the clones out there. If you receive the following error:
abort: can't rebase immutable changeset 43ab8134e7af
It means that Mecurial thinks this is a public changeset (see phases) that has already been pushed - you can force it to be a draft again doing:
hg phase -f -d 45:c3a3a271d11c
I encounter this fairly often. I make a commit and then pull to push. But then there is something incoming that makes my newly made commit unnecessary. A plain hg rollback isn't enough because it only undoes the pull...
This is the thing to do:
hg strip <rev>
Things are painless when you don't push your changesets anywhere.
If it's more than one commit and/or you already pushed it somewhere else, you can clone your repository and specify the last changeset that should be cloned.
See my answer here how to do this:
Mercurial: Fix a borked history
If you only committed locally and didn't push, you can just create a clone locally (as described in my link) and you're done.
If you already pushed to some remote repository, you would have to replace that with your clone.
Of course it depends if you are able (or allowed) to do this.
You can use "hg backout" to do a reverse merge basically. All options are discussed in the freely available book "Mercurial: The Definitive Guide":
http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/finding-and-fixing-mistakes.html
If using tortoise you can use modify history > strip...
Yes. Unless I am mistaken, as of v2.3 (rel. 2012/08/01) you can use the HisteditExtension with a drop command to drop a commit, along with strip or backout to remove changes.
A simple Google search on the feature: https://www.google.com/webhp#q=histedit+drop
In 2022 I do use evolve extension. It is one of the best extensions for this purpose.
To prune unwanted changeset, if you for example did a quick hack to get the code working:
$ echo 'debug hack' >> file1.c
$ hg commit -m 'debug hack'
Now you have a proper patch you can do hg prune .:
$ hg prune .
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
working directory is now at 2a39221aaebb
1 changesets pruned
If you push the change to the remote repository you will find only obsolescence markers:
$ hg push
searching for changes
no changes found
remote: 1 new obsolescence markers
To check the changes to your local repo you can pull from the remote one:
$ hg pull
pulling from ssh://userid#server/repo
searching for changes
no changes found
If you do an hg pull and then an hg update (or an hg merge), is there a way to back this out? Ie: revert your repository to the state prior to doing the hg pull?
I believe you can do hg update -r n where you would specify the changeset prior to the pull as n. Though I'm guessing this will still leave the changesets in your repository but this isn't really what we want. ??
hg strip will remove revisions from a repository. Like all powerful commands, its dangerous, so be careful.
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/StripExtension
Also see:
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/EditingHistory
If you catch your mistake immediately (or reasonably soon), you can just use hg strip REV to roll back the latest (one or more) changes. ...
Ok, you can't rollback because you've done a commit. What you can do is use 'hg strip' which is part of mq (after 2.8 strip is in it's own extension), or use mq to remove the changes. Either way I suggest you do everything on another clone, just in case.
To do strip, update to a revision that you want to keep, and then
hg strip <REV>
where <REV> is the first revision you want to remove. It will remove that one and all decendents (including your merge commit).
Alternatively you can
hg qnew (if you don't already have a patch queue)
hg qimport <REV>
which will import a single revision into the patch queue. You can then add more, and then use the mq commands to edit, rearrange, delete, or whatever you want to do with those revisions. qdel deletes the current patch.
Edit: Obviously, you'll need to enable the MQ extension for both of these, unless you're using 2.8 or later. In that case strip is in the strip extension, and mq in the mq extension. Both are shipped with the standard installation.
hg --rollback can be used to undo the last transaction so as long as your hg pull is still the most recent transaction then you can use that. This command should be used with care though. See here for some more details.
you can:
hg update -C <version>
see the mercurial FAQ.
If you want to remove all traces of the pull form your history then you need to use an extension as Bert F suggests (the philosophy in mercurial is to never change history)
if you dont mind history containing your mistake you have two slightly different options hg update -C -r which will create a new branch at the version you specify or hg revert -r which will stay on the same branch but create a new uncommited change undoing everything.