Safe way to purge history - Mercurial - 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

Related

How can I purge a branch in mercurial?

I am newbie dealing with mercurial. I did some mess trying on branches and now I want to "flat" all branches in just one "default"
josir#josir-desktop:~/bitbucket/campus$ hg branches
default 27:f28e8d8773c6
15 20:6b434f251b7e
branches has already been pushed to remote repo.
I want to purge all other branches discarding all changes on it. Reading those tutorial, I could not identify the best option to fix it.
The easiest thing is to just "close" the unwanted branches and leave them in peace:
hg update -r "branch('15')"
...
hg commit --close-branch
If you only have push/pull access to the remote repo, there's no way to remove changesets after you've pushed them. So close the branch and move on, or discard the bitbucket repo, clean the local one, and start over.
To clean up your local repo, if you have a big mess the easiest way is to pick a good revision (e.g., the tip of default, but you can choose an earlier one) and clone just that and all its ancestors:
hg clone -r <goodrev> messy-repo new-repo
The documentation (which you'd already cited) has a good explanation of this and several other branch-pruning options, but none of them are appropriate after you've pushed to a repository you don't control.
For already pushed branch you haven't any freedom: only --close-branch
When I issue hg branches, I got a two column report like the above:
josir#josir-desktop:~/bitbucket/spo$ hg branches
dev 232:31cf2690dd47 (inativo)
What have I understood for that ?
There are 2 opened branches :(
That was my big mistake. There is just ONE branch: dev
The second column "232:31cf..." is just the last commit of the "dev" branch!!!

After pushing to a review repository, "abort: can't rebase immutable changeset" on rebase

We have a code review repository where people hg push -f all sorts of stuff. After reviews are complete, we pull from the project's central repository, rebase, and push. I recently upgraded to mercurial 2.1 and get this message:
abort: can't rebase immutable changeset 43ab8134e7af
(see hg help phases for details)
when I try to hg pull --rebase from the central repository. How do I fix it?
In the review repository's .hg/hgrc file, add these lines:
[phases]
publish = False
The problem is due to a new feature in mercurial 2.1 called phases. It's great. Here is a nice introduction to its use.
To make the changesets in question mutable right now, use hg phase -f -d REV to force REV to be mutable again. Once the hgrc file has been changed, you shouldn't have to do that any more.
As a side note, hg push -f is lame. Make an alias hg review that pushes with -f to that repository.
I don't think disabling phase support on the server is the correct solution, but your problem sounds weird.
Pull --rebase should rebase your local changes, on top of the remote changes, which should be allowed, even if phases are supported by the client, as long as these changes have not been seen by anyone else, eg. they haven't been pushed out anywhere.
Is it possible that you have already pushed your your own changes, to somewhere else (which set them to public phase), and after that tried pulling from the testing repo? Because then, this is the correct behaviour that you are seeing.
Most of the time it is a bad idea to mess with phases manually (with hg phase -f), because it can easily lead to a history rewrite, which can lead to duplicated changesets, or various errors when other people try to pull/push. If a changeset became marked as public (as in your case), it probably happened for a good reason.
I've encountered such behaviour with collapsed rebase. Phasing out back to draft hadn't helped me. So I've just pulled up (hg pull -u) to sync with remote repo, then just grafted the problem commit (hg graft <problem_commit>) and then amended this very new commit.

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.

Discard a local branch in Mercurial before it is pushed

Many times it happens that I have few commits on my local Hg repository which I don't want to push and sometimes I want to remove the local branch altogether. But I cannot rollback more than one commit which leaves me no choice than creating a new clone and download the whole repository again. This feels stupid, since if I could just delete my local branch which has not affected the remote repository in anyway, then I wouldn't have to create and setup a new clone. So, is it how it is in Mercurial or is there some way to discard a local branch?
Thanks!
If you enable the mq extension (bundled with Mercurial), you can use hg strip. Be careful, though, as this will modify the history of your repository. The safe method is to clone your repository up to the revision preceding the creation of the branch you want to discard, then to pull the remaining changesets that you want to keep.
I know its too late but it may be useful for any one:
If your branch is not pushed yet.
First rollback changes hg rollback only if you have done commit but
not yet pushed
Second run hg update --clean
Third run hg branch any-existing-branch
Fourth run hg pull -u
If you find yourself doing this often perhaps you should be using bookmarks instead of named branches. http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/

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. :-)