Restrict access to mercurial repository using Redmine - mercurial

to project manage a mercurial repository, and track issues.
The workflow I want to use for the mercurial repository is branch based, i.e people are welcome to create branches and push their branches to the designated server. However I want to restrict access to the default(trunk) branch, so that all changes are merged by me into the default(trunk) branch.
This will allow control over things like code-review for each branch before merging it to the default(trunk) branch
Is there any way to use redmine to manage permissions and access to mercurial repositories?
I think I'm looking to do something like gitflow

Redmine only allows you to work on a local clone of the repository as explained in their official guide Redmine Oficcial guide#Mercurial-repository .
So i think you cant restrict the access to the repository on the web via Redmine.

Related

Using one Mercurial repository as local for two Mercurial installations

We have a dedicated issue tracking (Redmine) machine, which has a Mercurial repository (call it "Redmine repository"). Redmine is set up to use that repository, and as far as I understand, Redmine never makes any changes to that repository. All developers (eventually) push their changes to that repository.
We also have a dedicated production machine, which can execute the code, but is not used to make any changes to the code.
We have two choices:
Set up another Mercurial repository on the production machine (call it "production repository"). When a new production release is approved, pull the changes from the Redmine repository to the production repository, and then update the local working directory to the appropriate revision from the production repository.
Reuse the existing Redmine repository on the production machine designating it a local repository for the Mercurial installation there (the Redmine repository is on the shared drive that can be easily mounted on the production machine). Whenever a new production is approved, update the local working directory to the appropriate revision from the Redmine repository.
With option #2, we get rid of an extra "pull" step (from Redmine repository to production repository), which slightly simplifies the process. But I'm not sure if it's ok that a single repository is used by two Mercurial installations as if it's local.
Any comments on this choice (or any other aspect of this setup) is appreciated!
It sounds like a bad idea. Mercurial does a really good job of keeping reads and writes to its repository atomic, but it has a harder time doing that when the repository is on a shared drive -- even if it's only one local repository using it -- because network shares (especially on Windows) don't always make things atomic that they say they do.
Ideally your repositories (both the working dir and the repository) are local when possible, and you use push/pull to get changesets to/from a network share. If that's not possible then having a single local application using the repo on the remote file system is the best idea.
If you positively want to try having two clones using the same underlying repository check out the ShareExtension, which ships with Mercurial but is for advanced users only.
Instead of trying to piggy-back, why not just put a hook like this in your redmine repository:
[hooks]
changegroup = hg push //production/clone
That will automatically push changesets that arrive in redmine to production.

Mercurial and online sharing - how to proceed

A noob question... i think
I use Mercurial for my project on my laptop. How do i submit the project to an online server like codeplex?
I'm using tortoisehg and i cant find the upload interface for submit the project online...
From the command line, the command is:
hg push <url>
to push changes a remote repository.
In TortoiseHg, this is accessed through the "Synchronize" function, which seems to show up if you right-click in a Windows Explorer window but not on any file. It's also available in the workbench; the icon is 2 arrows pointing in a circle.
For these things, I find the best way to go is to use the command line interface - TortoiseHG is OK if you need to perform some common operations from the file browser, and it's a nice tool to visualize some aspects of your repository, but it doesn't implement all of mercurial's features in full detail, and it renames and bundles some operations for no apparent reason.
I don't know how things work at codeplex, but I assume it is similar to bitbucket or github, in which case here's what you'd do:
Create an empty repository on the remote end (codeplex / bitbucket / ...).
Find the remote repository's URL - for bitbucket, it is https://bitbucket.org/yourname/project, or ssh://hg#bitbucket.org/yourname/project.
From your local repository, commit all pending changes, then issue the command: hg push {remote_url}, where {remote_url} is the URL of the remote repository. This will push all committed changes from your local repository to the remote repository.
Since the remote's head revision (an empty project) is the same as the first revision in your local copy (because all hg repositories start out empty), mercurial should consider the two repositories related and accept the push.
For an introductory guide to command-line mercurial, I recommend http://hginit.com/

Is it possible to use Mercurial ACL Extension in a Bitbucket repository?

We have a small team working together with a BitBucket Mercurial repository. The thing is we have a "Releases" branch and want to restrict access to this to just certain people.
I've been looking to the Mercurial ACL extension, but it seems to work just with local repositories.
Do you know any solution for this if everyone pushes directly to Bitbucket?
Thx!
No, you cannot use the ACL extension with Bitbucket. It would have to be enabled on their servers and they would have to provide a web interface for you to edit the rules. They haven't done this.
What you can do is to use a fork (separate repository) on Bitbucket to store your releases. You can restrict push/pull access on a per-fork basis so this could help you.
An alternative is to let only a few people push to the Bitbucket repository. They would then act as gatekeepers and so they can reject changesets on the wrong branch.
However, restricting access like this is generally not necessary. If it is, then you have a social problem that you should solve by talking with your developers.

Cloning/Converting Local Perforce Workspace to Mercurial Repo

I'm new to Perforce and Mercurial, so bear with me. I would like to use Mercurial to interface with Perforce in the following way:
I check-out a local Perforce workspace using the P4V client. I then clone a Mercurial repo of that workspace, and use this cloned repo for all my work. When I need updated files, I would first update the local Perforce workspace, and then have the Mercurial repo pull from that. When I'm ready to commit, I push my changes to the local Perforce workspace. Then I use the P4V client to commit my changes in the Perforce workspace to the Perforce depot. Essentially, the local Perforce workspace is a proxy for the Perforce repot.
The reason behind this set-up (versus the common scenario of directly pulling from and pushing to the Perforce repot) is that there is some configuration I need to do via the P4V client (such as mapping/renaming files and directories).
I've looked at the convert and perfarce extensions, but I'm not quite sure they do what I want. They seem to do a one-time conversion, and then thereafter they talk directly to the Perforce repot. Any help would be appreciated.
Convert does an incremental conversion, where it will convert only new changes, but it's unidirectional only (perforce -> mercurial).
I've not looked at the perfarce extension, but it's my understanding that's it's built for a bi-directional, continuous process -- you might want to look at it again.
Alternately, the non-extension options on the Working with Subversion page in the mercurial wiki, details a process for using Mercurial alongside/atop Subversion w/o them interacting in any way except for the file working directory. That's probably very similar to what you're looking to do.
The Perfarce extension should do what you want. I'm also experimenting with a similar setup, and I can pull & push to Perforce quite happily.
I must admit I am having issues with local config files and how they operate in this environment, but there's a couple of other answers here on SO that appear to address this.
I would recommend you give Perfarce a go first, before reverting to anything more manual.

Storing separate named branches in mercurial without having to merge them

It's my first time using a DVCS and also as a lone developer, the first time that I've actually used branches, so maybe I'm missing something here.
I have a remote repository from which I pulled the files and started working. Changes were pushed to the remote repository and of course this simple scenario works fine.
Now that my web application has some stable features, I'd like to start deploying it and so I cloned the remote repository to a new branches/stable directory outside of my working directory for the default branch and used:
hg branch stable
to create a new named branch. I created a bunch of deployment scripts that are needed only by the stable branch and I committed them as needed. Again this worked fine.
Now when I went back to my initial working directory to work on some new features, I found out that Mercurial insists on only ONE head being in the remote repository. In other words, I'd have to merge the two branches (default and stable), adding in the unneeded deployment scripts to my default branch in order to push to the main repository. This could get worse, if I had to make a change to a file in my stable branch in order to deploy.
How do I keep my named branches separate in Mercurial? Do I have to create two separate remote repositories to do so? In which case the named branches lose their value. Am I missing something here?
Use hg push -f to force the creation of a new remote head.
The reason push won't do it by default is that it's trying to remind you to pull and merge in case you forgot. What you don't want to happen is:
You and I check out revision 100 of named branch "X".
You commit locally and push.
I commit locally and push.
Now branch X looks like this in the remote repo:
--(100)--(101)
\
\---------(102)
Which head should a new developer grab if they're checking out the branch? Who knows.
After re reading the section on named branchy development in the Mercurial book, I've concluded that for me personally, the best practice is to have separate shared repositories, one for each branch. I was on the free account at bitbucket.org, so I was trying to force myself to use only one shared repository, which created the problem.
I've bit the bullet and got myself a paid account so that I can keep a separate shared repository for my stable releases.
You wrote:
I found out that Mercurial insists on only ONE head being in the remote repository.
Why do you think this is the case?
From the help for hg push:
By default, push will refuse to run if it detects the result would
increase the number of remote heads. This generally indicates the
the client has forgotten to pull and merge before pushing.
If you know that you are intentionally creating a new head in the remote repository, and this is desirable, use the -f flag.
I've come from git expecting the same thing. Just pushing the top looks like it might be one approach.
hg push -r tip