Remote bookmarks in Mercurial to keep new features separate - mercurial

I'd like to use bookmarks in Mercurial to share new features with other developers. I have followed the basic workflow as they appear here or here. In short:
$ hg bookmark main
$ hg bookmark feature
$ hg update feature
$ hg commit -m "changes"
$ hg push -B feature
My main problem is that at this point my changes are not separate from the default branch, and if someone else does
$ hg pull
$ hg update
in their working directory, they get my changes, too, which is not intended - I would like them to do hg update feature to get them.
I figure if I then commit something (an empty commit maybe) to main and push that as well, all is well and feature appears separate. But is there a better way achieving the same result?

Mercurial knows the special bookmark #. Attach that to a commit which is updated to by default.
See also the wiki, section 5.

Related

Mercurial equivalent to hg qdiff?

mq, which I like a lot, but which I understand is being deprecated in favor of changeset evolution, provides a command hg qdiff that shows the combination of the last-saved patch mixed with the current working directory diffs. I.e., it shows what will be the content of the complete patch if I enter hg commit --amend right now.
Is there a way to show the combined diff like that in base (non-mq) mercurial?
I realized the answer as I prepared to submit the question: hg diff with respect to the parent of the current change:
hg diff -r '.^'

Make another branch default?

I have a Mercurial repo at Bitbucket and on my local machine, both are mirrors, up to date. I created a feature branch, reflected in both repos. I did all my work in the feature branch.
The feature branch is now complete and I want to now make it the default for the main repo and my local copy. I don't really care about the default branch, enough work has gone into the feature branch that all I want to do is designate it as the new default.
I don't think I want to merge nor should I? How can I do this so both local and remote don't get confused?
Just merge feature-branch into default then close feature-branch:
$ hg checkout default
$ hg merge feature-branch
$ hg commit
$ hg checkout feature-branch
$ hg commit --close-branch
There is no more clean and sensible way (that I'm aware of) to “make feature-branch the default”.
One thing that wouldn't be as nice, but you could do, is to make a commit to default on top of feature-branch:
$ hg checkout feature-branch
$ hg branch default
$ hg commit
But this would leave two heads in the default branch, which is suboptimal.
Since Mercurial 2.4, you can create an bookmark called # and Mercurial will checkout that revision new clones.
However, I would still try to stick with using default as the branch where the main development takes place. Doing so will cause the least amount of surprise for developers already used to Mercurial — the wiki describes the standard way to use branches in Mercurial.
If you follow the conventional advice of using default as the main branch for development, then you should close your feature branch before you merge it back:
$ hg update feature-branch
$ hg commit --close-branch -m "Feature done, merging into default branch"
$ hg update default
$ hg merge feature-branch
$ hg commit
If you haven't done any work at all on the default branch since your started the feature branch, then this merge will be trivial and have no conflicts. Otherwise you'll have to resolve conflicts. If you're sure you want to keep everything from the feature branch, then you can do
$ hg merge --noninteractive --tool internal:local feature-branch
$ hg revert --all --rev feature-branch
instead of just hg merge above. That will make sure that the new commit on default look exactly like the last commit on feature-branch.
I succeded without merging by closing the default branch.
in my development repository working directory:
$ hg update default
$ hg commit --close
then my development branch became the new default branch.
But i do not know the rules for why my development branch was choosen
as the new default.
i think it is because it was my tip ?
(or maybe last changed branch? (tip?))
I also think that you have to repeat that next time.
Because i think my chosen branch name was "overwritten" by the 'default' name.
It would be nice to have branch name.
dev-projectname-version.x=default
regards
I wanted to do just what you described and hunted around until I found an answer which uses the revert command to do just what you describe. Here is the code I used:
hg revert --all --rev ${1}
hg commit -m "Restoring branch ${1} as default"
where ${1} is the number of the revision or the name of the branch. These two lines are actually part of a bash script, but they work fine on their own if you want to do it manually.
This is useful if you need to add a hot fix to a release branch, but need to build from default (until we get our CI tools right and able to build from branches and later do away with release branches as well).

How do you delete a commit in Mercurial?

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

No changes are pushed when using hg-git

I'm trying to get the hg-git extension working under Windows and after hours of fiddling, I finally seem to have it working. However, nothing shows up in my git repository even though the output of hg push reads:
importing Hg objects into Git
creating and sending data
github::refs/heads/master => GIT:8d946209
[command completed successfully Wed Oct 20 15:26:47 2010]
Try issuing the command hg bookmark -f master
(use -f to force an existing bookmark to move)
Then try pushing again.
This works because Hg-Git pushes your bookmarks up to the Git server as branches and will pull Git branches down and set them up as bookmarks. (from the official README.md)
And it seems that just after I asked this, I made a trivial change. This was picked up and pushed. So it seems that you have to wait until you've made a new commit in order for hg-git to pick it up.
I had chosen to 'Initialize this repository with a README'. This meant I ended up with two heads, which I couldn't hg merge because one had a bookmark.
To get pushing working, I had to:
configure hg-git and github remote as per https://blog.glyphobet.net/essay/2029
pull from github and update
force the merge (checking which id to use with hg heads),
commit the merge
add a trivial change to a file (add a space char to the end),
commit, then
move the bookmark to the tip
push to my configured github remote
This ended up with commands as follows (substituting in <x> sections)
hg pull github
hg update
hg merge <revision-id-of-incoming-git-version>
hg addremove
hg commit -m 'merged with github'
# make some trivial change to a file - eg add a space where it doesn't cause harm
hg add <changed-file>
hg commit -m 'trivial change'
hg bookmark -f master
hg push github
make sure you pick the remote revision for the merge above - if you don't it doesn't work!

Trying to merge back from branch to main and close branch in Mercurial

I've got a named branch (same repository) that was created in order to to spike something. I've now decided that I want to move all the changesets created in the branch back into the main (default) and then close the branch.
I've tried a number of different things, including what was outlined in this post (How to repeatedly merge branches in Mercurial) but I just can't get it working :(
Can anyone provide any pointers?
Thanks.
Merge the feature branch into default
hg up default
hg merge feature-branch-name
hg ci -m 'merged feature-branch-name into default'
Close the branch you don't want to use anymore
hg up feature-branch-name
hg ci --close-branch -m 'close feature-branch-name branch'
hg up default
Note that the close command doesn't have any disruptive effects on the repository history
It flags your branch as closed so that it won't appear in hg branches and hg heads commands output
I've managed to solve my problem using the link I mentioned in my question. The steps described in the link had actually merged my changes across however I didn't realise as I was looking in the TortoiseHg UI and couldn't see the changes there. When I performed hg outgoing via the command line it appears that the merge had worked correctly.