I would like to know how is it supposed to do the following in mercurial.
My repository is on our server where mercurial-server is running. I develop on Windows and because my project is supposed to be multiplatform, I've set up Jenkins build server which builds using a Linux slave machine automatically after each push.
Now what I need:
Quite often the build on Linux does not work, because I'm using "treat warnings as errors" and gcc gives different warnings than MSVC. Then I need to fix the build and I don't want to mess the repository with "fixing" commits (often more commits are needed to fix all gcc warnings). It would be ok for me to have a single commit in the repo for a fix of the linux build.
I thought I could just clone the repository to a 'fixing repo' (like a branch using clone) and do as many fixing commits as needed. Then just merge all these commits to the main repo as a single fixing commit. But then I need to make my 'fixing repo' public (i.e. clone the fixing repo to the remote server) to allow jenkins to build the sources. But how to get rid of the 'fixing repo' when the fix is finished? It is probably not a good idea to allow users delete remote repositories, is it?
Possibilities I see:
1) forgot about branching using clone, do a named branch, fix, merge to master branch and close the fixing branch - probably not a common solution in mercurial to create a named branch for this
2) just create a new head (possibly set a bookmark), fix, merge to master head (branch) and close the fixing head (can I close a head?) - better but I still have to do with all fixing commits in the main repository
3) using the cloned 'fixing repo', set up ssh access or even mercurial-server for Jenkins to my personal machine and let it clone from it, build and when the build is fixed, just merge all commit from local 'fixing repo' to remote repository as a single commit
Some better solution? Or do I want to do something unusual?
Thanks.
Related
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/
I am developing a web database that is already in use for about a dozen separate installations, most of which I also manage. Each installation has a fair bit of local configuration and customization. Having just switched to mercurial from svn, I would like to take advantage of its distributed nature to keep track of local modifications. I have set up each installed server as its own repo (and configured apache not to serve the .hg directories).
My difficulty is that the development tree also contains local configuration, and I want to avoid placing every bit of it in an unversioned config file. So, how do I set things up to avoid propagating local configuration to the master repo and to the installed copies?
Example: I have a long config.ini file that should be versioned and distributed. The "clean" version contains placeholders for the database connection parameters, and I don't want the development server's passwords to end up in the repositories for the installed copies. But now and then I'll make changes (e.g., new defaults) that I do need to propagate. There are several files in a similar situation.
The best I could work out so far involves installing mq and turning the local modifications into a patch (two patches, actually, with logically separate changesets). Every time I want to commit a regular changeset to the local repo, I need to pop all patches, commit the modifications, and re-apply the patches. When I'm ready to push to the master repo, I must again pop the patches, push, and re-apply them. This is all convoluted and error-prone.
The only other alternative I can see is to forget about push and only propagate changesets as patches, which seems like an even worse solution. Can someone suggest a better set-up? I can't imagine that this is such an unusual configuration, but I haven't found anything about it.
Edit: After following up on the suggestions here, I'm coming to the conclusion that named branches plus rebase provide a simple and workable solution. I've added a description in the form of my own answer. Please take a look.
From your comments, it looks like you are already familiar with the best practice for dealing with this: version a configuration template, and keep the actual configuration unversioned.
But since you aren't happy with that solution, here is another one you can try:
Mercurial 2.1 introduced the concept of Phases. The phase is changeset metadata marking it as "secret", "draft" or "public". Normally this metadata is used and manipulated automatically by mercurial and its extensions without the user needing to be aware of it.
However, if you made a changeset 1234 which you never want to push to other repositories, you can enforce this by manually marking it as secret like this:
hg phase --force --secret -r 1234
If you then try to push to another repository, it will be ignored with this warning:
pushing to http://example.com/some/other/repository
searching for changes
no changes found (ignored 1 secret changesets)
This solution allows you to
version the local configuration changes
prevent those changes from being pushed accidentally
merge your local changes with other changes which you pull in
The big downside is of course that you cannot push changes which you made on top of this secret changeset (because that would push the secret changeset along). You'll have to rebase any such changes before you can push them.
If the problem with a versioned template and an unversioned local copy is that changes to the template don't make it into the local copies, how about modifying your app to use an unversioned localconfig.ini and fallback to a versioned config.ini for missing parameters. This way new default parameters can be added to config.ini and be propagated into your app.
Having followed up on the suggestions here, I came to the conclusion that named branches plus rebase provide a simple and reliable solution. I've been using the following method for some time now and it works very well. Basically, the history around the local changes is separated into named branches which can be easily rearranged with rebase.
I use a branch local for configuration information. When all my repos support Phases, I'll mark the local branch secret; but the method works without it. local depends on default, but default does not depend on local so it can be pushed independently (with hg push -r default). Here's how it works:
Suppose the main line of development is in the default branch. (You could have more branches; this is for concreteness). There is a master (stable) repo that does not contain passwords etc.:
---o--o--o (default)
In each deployed (non-development) clone, I create a branch local and commit all local state to it.
...o--o--o (default)
\
L--L (local)
Updates from upstream will always be in default. Whenever I pull updates, I merge them into local (n is a sequence of new updates):
...o--o--o--n--n (default)
\ \
L--L--N (local)
The local branch tracks the evolution of default, and I can still return to old configurations if something goes wrong.
On the development server, I start with the same set-up: a local branch with config settings as above. This will never be pushed. But at the tip of local I create a third branch, dev. This is where new development happens.
...o--o (default)
\
L--L (local)
\
d--d--d (dev)
When I am ready to publish some features to the main repository, I first rebase the entire dev branch onto the tip of default:
hg rebase --source "min(branch('dev'))" --dest default --detach
The previous tree becomes:
...o--o--d--d--d (default)
\
L--L (local)
The rebased changesets now belong to branch default. (With feature branches, add --keepbranches to the rebase command to retain the branch name). The new features no longer have any ancestors in local, and I can publish them with push -r default without dragging along the local revisions. (Never merge from local into default; only the other way around). If you forget to say -r default when pushing, no problem: Your push gets rejected since it would add a new head.
On the development server, I merge the rebased revs into local as if I'd just pulled them:
...o--o--d--d--d (default)
\ \
L--L-----N (local)
I can now create a new dev branch on top of local, and continue development.
This has the benefits that I can develop on a version-controlled, configured setup; that I don't need to mess with patches; that previous configuration stages remain in the history (if my webserver stops working after an update, I can update back to a configured version); and that I only rebase once, when I'm ready to publish changes. The rebasing and subsequent merge might lead to conflicts if a revision conflicts with local configuration changes; but if that's going to happen, it's better if they occur when merge facilities can help resolve them.
1 Mercurial have (follow-up to comments) selective (string-based) commit - see Record Extension
2 Local changes inside versioned public files can be easy received with MQ Extension (I do it for site-configs all time). Your headache with MQ
Every time I want to commit a regular changeset to the local repo, I
need to pop all patches, commit the modifications, and re-apply the
patches. When I'm ready to push to the master repo, I must again pop
the patches, push, and re-apply them.
is a result of not polished workflow and (some) misinterpretation. If you want commit without MQ-patches - don't do it by hand. Add alias for commit, which qop -all + commit and use this new command only. And when you push, you may don't worry about MQ-state - you push changesets from repo, not WC state. Local repo can also be protected without alias by pre-commit hook checking content.
3 You can try LocalBranches extension, where your local changes stored inside local branches (and merge branches on changes) - I found this way more troublesome, compared to MQ
I want to do the equivalent of svn export REMOTE_URL with a mercurial repository. What I want at the end is an unversioned snapshot of the repository at the remote URL, but without cloning all of the changesets over to my local machine.
Also, I want to be able to specify a tag in the remote repository to pick this from. If it's not obvious, I'm building a release management tool that pulls from a canonical mercurial repository to build a release file, and it's slow right now because some projects have large, multiple-version binary files committed.
Is this possible? How would one go about it?
Its usually easier (if the remote HG is using the hgweb interface) to just visit the repo in your browser and download a .tgz / .zip / .bz2 of the tip revision. You'll see the links if the remote HG supports this.
If you want the repository, you need all of the revisions that went into the current tip for it to be at all functional.
There are options to hg clone that allow you to fetch a repository up to a certain revision, but none (that I could find) that allow you to get just the tip revision. What you are essentially asking for is a snapshot of the repo.
Edit: To Get A Snapshot
hg clone http[s]://url.to.repo repo.hg
cd repo.hg
hg archive ../repo-snapshot
cd ..
rm -rf repo.hg
The snapshot is now in repo-snapshot.
Yes, this does entail cloning the repo first, which is why I suggested seeing if the remote hgweb supports on the fly downloads of any particular revision. If it does, your problem is solved with something like curl or wget instead of HG.
If not, its good to let the original repo 'live' since you can update it again later via hg pull, then create another snapshot of a future release. This saves having to start over from scratch when cloning, especially for large repositories with lots of changes.
Also, Linux centric, but you get the gist. Of course, replace http[s] with the desired protocol as needed.
Is there any reason you can't maintain a mirror (updated in the background however often you want) of the remote repository on your local machine, then have the release management tool on your local machine run hg archive out of the local clone as necessary? If your concern is user-responsiveness, and not total bandwidth/storage consumed, this offsets the "slow" part to where you won't see it.
Tim Post noted that if you do have the hgweb CGI interface available, you can configure it to pull compressed archives down and unpack them (and the interface is consistent enough that you could script that via wget), but if you don't, core Mercurial doesn't have a lot of tools to help you, and the developers have expressed an opposition to trying to turn Mercurial into a general rsync-type client.
If you aren't afraid of playing with unofficial add-ons, you could have a look at the FTP Extension. That will force you to push from the server, however.
I use an ant file to build a java project in mercurial through hudson.
The mailnine has a hudson job running just fine.
Recently a new branch was created and pushed to the server by commnd line:
hg branch newbranch
hg commit
hg push -f
The mainine does not contain these changes and still builds fine.
I have set up a new job with the same setting as mainline (in fact copied mainline job in hudson), and specified the newbranch.
However, the newbranch job builds code identical to mainline.
If I commandline clone the repository and switch to the newbranch everything looks as expected. This seems to be a hudson configuration glitch unless my merqurial skills are off course.
I have also tried to set up the job from sratch with settings identical to mainline with the addition of the newbranch specification without any luck.
What am I missing?
Anyone any ideas?
Try putting the branch in the URL to clone like:
http://server/path/to/repo#newbranch
or
ssh://user#server//path/to/repo#newbranch
You can see the full syntax for branch-in-repo-url using hg help urls
URL Paths
Valid URLs are of the form:
local/filesystem/path[#revision]
file://local/filesystem/path[#revision]
http://[user[:pass]#]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
https://[user[:pass]#]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
ssh://[user[:pass]#]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
Paths in the local filesystem can either point to Mercurial repositories
or to bundle files (as created by 'hg bundle' or 'hg incoming --bundle').
An optional identifier after # indicates a particular branch, tag, or
changeset to use from the remote repository. See also 'hg help revisions'.
One issue with cloning a job is that the 'cloned' job is created as soon as you hit the clone button. While you are still configuring the cloned job, it may hit a build trigger like an SCM polling event that causes it to kick off before you have fully configured it.
I believe this was fixed in later versions of Hudson, but cannot find the changelog entry for job cloning. The same issue existed for cloning a slave configuration, and the problem was fixed in Hudson 1.319.
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