How to not push closed branches - mercurial

I have created three branches by mistake.
I closed them by command hg commit --close-branch -m "Closing this head".
Then I switched to another branch MVDM-9.
I want to push my changes to a remote repository, but I get this error.
hg push
pushing to ssh://hg#bitbucket.org/Predictix/mvideo-modeler
searching for changes
abort: push creates new remote branches: MVDM-57C, MVDM-57T, MVDM-60!
(use 'hg push --new-branch' to create new remote branches)
MVDM-57C, MVDM-57T, MVDM-60 are the branches which I closed.
How do I resolve the problem?

You have a couple of options here.
First option (safe)
You can just push the revisions you want to push rather than pushing everything. You just use
hg push -r <revision_number>
substituting <revision_number> with the latest revision number that you want to push, and it will then only push that revision and the revisions that went into it.
Second option (dangerous)
If you have never pushed, pulled or copied the branches that you closed to anywhere else and you don't want to keep them for the history and will never use them then you can strip the changes.
Make sure you take a backup clone of your repository before you start doing this because you could easily destroy your existing copy.
You will need to enabled the strip extension first if it's not already enabled, and then the usage is
hg strip -r <revision_number>
This will delete <revision_number> and all its children from the repository, so you need to be careful what revision you select to delete.
If you've got TortoiseHg installed you can do this via the Workbench UI and you can do it a revision at a time until you've got what you want.
You can always use option 1 first, and then after you've pushed the revisions you want up to the remote repo you can strip the unwanted branches from your local copy.

Related

Safe way to purge history - Mercurial

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

creating a new branch in mercurial: "abort: push creates new remote head"

I am trying to do something very simple: create a new branch. But I messed up. Where did I make the mistake, and how do I fix it?
I am the only user of Mercurial. I had revision 54 committed and pushed to remote repository. I wanted to create a branch based on revision 53, so I updated my local copy to revision 53, made changes, and committed (ignoring the warning about "it's not the head"). Then when I am trying to push to remote repository, it says
abort: push creates new remote head
Maybe I needed to tell Mercurial that I want to create a new branch? If so, how and at what point?
Thanks!
You tell Mercurial that it can go ahead with
$ hg push --force
You need to force it since multiple (unnamed) heads are normally discouraged. The problem with them is that people that clone the repository wont know which one to use. But since you're the only user you can just go ahead and push.
The alternative is to use a named branch (with hg branch) and then you'll use
$ hg push --new-branch
to allow the creation of a new branch on the remote. Named branches have the advantage that they make it easy to distinguish the two branches. They have the disadvantage that they are permanent. Permanent means that you cannot remove the branch name from the changesets on the branch — the name is literally baked directly into the changeset.
Bookmarks provide a way to have non-permanent branch names, see hg help bookmarks.
Another reason for this error: probably there are some UNMERGED changes form the central repo in your default branch.
hg up default
hg merge
hg ci -m "Merge"
hg pus
I did this. Using TortoiseHg ... this is how I fixed it:
In settings, I enabled the Strip extension then right clicked the branch i did not want, Modified History - strip. If you have pushed, then it needs to be stripped from all other repositories, including workmates who have pulled your unwanted branch.
An alternative is to merge the unwanted branch into your main branch, but do not take any of the changes from that branch - I am unsure of how that mechanism works.

cannot push to remote repo after merge

branching out -
[default]$ hg branch talks
[talks]$ <... some commits ...>
[talks]$ hg update default
merging back -
[default]$ hg merge talks
3 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
pushing to remote repo -
[default]$ hg commit -m "merging talks to default"
[default]$ $ hg push
abort: push creates new remote branches: talks!
(use 'hg push --new-branch' to create new remote branches)
Further investigation revealed that remote repo doesn't want me to have multiple heads at the remote end. But I just did a merge to merge the two heads into one, isn't it?
The graph from hg serve also seems to agree with me (I hope)
However, I also see two heads from hg heads
[default]$ hg branches
default 9:85752ecd6326
talks 8:2b00714d76d5 (inactive)
The solution is in the abort message: use 'hg push --new-branch'. You've created a named branch called talks so it needs this extra switch, regardless if you have merged the named branch back to default.
I'm guessing you've misunderstood the branch feature. You've just created a branch who's name will live forever in the repository. I suspect you didn't really want to do this. You might want to investigate the bookmarks feature for local branches that don't end up with names that live forever in the repository.
Mercurial balks at pushes that add new global branch names to the repository being pushed to because that's so very rarely what you really want to do. hg push --new-branch will tell Mercurial that yes, you really mean to do that.
The two heads you're seeing are misleading. Notice how one head is listed as '(inactive)'. That just means it's the last change on the global branch, but not an actual head. You frequently want to see the heads of branches, even if those heads actually have children and are not really heads.
As a small aside... I wrote the code that added that feature to the 'heads' command awhile back. :-)

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!