Closing unneeded branches in Hg but backdating that - mercurial

I have a lot of projects that are started and soon closed on top of my framework. I often have to do fixes for them. So we decided that it will be nice to maintain a separate named branch for each such project.
The problem is that I want to close the branches when the projects are done, but the teams that work on the projects are remote and I usually do not know the status of the project. I can ask the team every month what projects were closed, but the projects are usually very short, and we have 5-10 of them till the end of the month. I do not want to bother them and ask each day.
If I just close them each 1st day of the month, I receive this picture:
Which is a bit ugly. How could I close the branch, but put the close marker just after the branch in the tree and not now? I'm probably looking for a way to change the history, but to not rebase, but rather change the "Revision number" and "Created date" of the changeset so it would be sorted differently.
Any other solutions?

This is just aesthetics, there is no value in changing the way it looks. A few days in the month and you won't see that pattern again until next month.
If you really want to do it anyway, know that the repo does not care about the date of the commit, it just cares about when it was added to it, either from commit directly or from push/pull. So the idea is to reorder how they are added. You do not have to change the history, just rearrange the changesets.
The method would be to clone the repo to the initial commit, and pull one closed branch after the other. It would look like this:
hg clone <repo> -r1
hg pull -b <closed-branch-1>
hg pull -b <closed-branch-2>
...
hg pull
The last pull is to retrieve the remaining changesets in active branches.
After that, if you are satisfied with how it looks, you can replace your main repo with this new one.

Related

How to clone from a specific revision to the last one using Mercurial?

In Mercurial , How to clone from a specific revision to the last one using ?
For example repo A have one line history from changeset 0 to changeset 100. and I want to clone A to my local repo from changeset 90 to last one (100).
Looking through the help, I noticed the -r flag but that only clone 1 specific changeset.
And if there is no way to do it can somebody explain why its not implemented ? its considered a bad thing to do ?
Thanks.
You can't.
The current state of the project is all changesets from the beginning of time up until the specific changeset, you cannot prune older changesets without rewriting the history of the repository to permanently get rid of them. This will also make the repository incompatible with the original that contains the old history.
In short, you will have to do one of the following:
Prune the old history, permanently getting rid of it, which will make it impossible to push/pull with original clones that still has that history
Live with the history
The parameters to the clone command that specifies revsets thus only allow you to set an upper limit. This may allow you to avoid whole branches, if they aren't merged into the branch you end up cloning, but the clone command will always clone everything from the beginning of time.
For every changeset you clone, every predecessor will be cloned as well, and this cannot be avoided.

Can't push new heads - fail to see how they would be created

I'm fairly new to version control in teams. So far I've mostly used it solo.
I've read that the following workflow is recommended:
Commit locally, pull master, merge master into my branch, merge my
branch into master, push. Several times a week or even day
So that's what I tried to do. However, when I was done with my feature, and tried to push, tortoise hg told me, that this would create new remote heads.
hg help push tells me about two options:
Merge first: Did that
Use -f: I know enough not to do that.
I think I understand the concept of rebasing - which I don't think applies here, since I'm the only one who did anything in this commit tree. Of course I've pulled.
So my question is: How can I resolve this specific situation?
Also, recommendations for where to learn proper version control workflow would be nice. Everything I find tells me what the commands are, but I've failed to find clear instructions on when to use them.
I've added a picture of the project. Commit 147 was mine, and I could push it just fine. All oher commits are also made by me.
hg reports a "head" for every named branch. In your screenshot, you are needing to push rev 154, which is the head of your kjeld branch. It is an outgoing changeset because you are pushing rev 155 and you must therefore push 155's entire history as well. Others will get that branch when they pull your changes and will have a head on their version of kjeld (note that it will most likely not be numbered 154 since those numbers are repo specific). You will be fine though since that head is a close-branch changeset so it will not appear in their default list for hg heads and hg branches.
One way to avoid your current issue is to use bookmarks to temporarily note what that head represents e.g. issue-45, big-feature-2, etc. and only push when merged into mainline development.
For us, we set up a "private" repo for each dev on the server where they store/backup work in progress. It is expected that there are multiple heads, dead branches, and other gunk in these "private" repos. The dev repo, however, only ever has a single head and must pass the build and build tests.
In response to your comment about your "private" branch: When you push your tip you will also push your branch named kjeld. Others who want to work on that code must pull it to get the tip of your development. It will not be a "private" branch.

How to revert a file to an earlier version in Mercurial?

I made some changes to a file and committed it. (In fact there were several commits).
Then I wanted to revert to the earlier version and lose all those changes.
I did something like:
hg update -r nnn where nnn was the reversion number of the changeset I wanted to go back to.
That worked. I was happy.
Then, later, I had to push my local repository to the remote. But when I did hg push I got a message about there being two heads on this branch and one of them not being known to the remote repositiory. It suggested I merge before pushing. (I think).
I googled this and found a page that suggested I do "hg merge". I did that. Now the resultant file is back to where I started. I.e. it contains all the changes I wanted to throw away.
Where did i go wrong?
EDIT:
I have found this post Mercurial — revert back to old version and continue from there
where it says:
If later you commit, you will effectively create a new branch. Then
you might continue working only on this branch or eventually merge the
existing one into it.
That sounds like my case. Something went wrong at the merging stage it seems. Was I on the wrong branch when I did "hg merge"?
You're past this point now but if it happens again, and it's just a single file you want to revert then consider:
hg revert --rev REVISION_YOU_LIKED path/to/just/one/file.txt
That doesn't update you whole repository to a different revision, and it doesn't create any commits. It just takes a single file in your working directory and makes it look like it used to. After doing that you can just commit and you're set.
That's not the way to go if you want to undo all the changes you've made to all files, but for reverting a single file use revert and avoid multiple heads and merging entirely.
No, nothing went wrong at the merge stage – Mercurial did exactly what you asked it to...
What merge means is that you take the changes on your current branch, and the changes on the 'other' branch, and you merge them. Since your original changes were in the 'other' branch, Mercurial carefully merged them back into your current branch.
What you needed to do was to discard the 'other' branch. There are various ways of doing that. The Mercurial help pages discuss the various techniques, but there are pointers in other SO questions: see for example Discard a local branch in Mercurial before it is pushed and Remove experimental branch.
(Edit) Afterthought: the reason you got a warning about there being two heads on the branch is because having two heads is often a temporary situation, so pushing them to a remote repository is something you don't want to do accidentally. Resolutions are (i) you did mean to push them, so use --force to create two heads in the remote repository; (ii) ooops!, you meant to merge them before pushing, so do that; or (iii) ooops!, you'd abandoned the 'other' one, so get rid of it. Your case was (iii).

What is the best way to do a code review across multiple commits, with TortoiseHg?

The problem that I'm running into is that I have some code reviews to do, with ~10 commits per review. It's an active repo with constant commits from developers. I have TortoiseHg filtering my changesets so that I am looking only at the ones that I care about.
What I would like to see is the difference between the changeset before the first change, and the last (without all the non-related changesets showing). I simply want to see the final results of all these changes. I don't care that there was some horrible code in changeset 1, that was fixed in 3. I just want to see the diff of what ultimately got merged through all these changesets.
I feel like I'm missing the obvious, and this isn't a bright question. Nevertheless, I'm asking anyways. Anyone?
I'm not sure about 1.1.8, as I'm using the 1.9/2.0 candidate release, but I believe you could left-click on changeset1, right-click on revision3 and select visual Diff. This should open your diff tool of choice and only show you the diffs between the 2 versions.
When I did this in the newer tortoise, it opened BeyondCompare in directory compare mode, with revision1 on one side, and revision2 on the other.
Don't merge in between commits and diff off the developers clone between start and finish changesets.
Or If merges occured, update and merge everything and then take the entire codebase (or just changed files) and dump it onto a clean tip clone (make sure you are working with the same version to avoid overwriting anything). Recommit all at once.

Branch from the past in mercurial

I'm a single developer using Mercurial to create a program. I have so far committed at every step of developing, and I have messed things up and want to work on something else.
How shall I go to a previous state (ie. rollback) and then create a branch, maintaining the newer states?
Does rollback ever delete anything? Should that be all I do? Just rollback untill I'm at the place where I want, edit, then commit? Will I be able to merge the changesets later, or at least look at them? Of course I can just save this repository, rollback, and then create new changesets, then merge the two repositories?
I'm new to SCM and of course DSCM, so be gentle :)
You don't want to use hg rollback, that only erases exactly one change (the most recent). See You Can Only Roll Back Once in the hg book.
To make a branch from an earlier revision, you need to find the revision number you want to branch from and run:
hg clone -r <revnum> <source repository> <destination repository>
You can then do your changes in the newly-cloned repository (which will not contain any of the history that came after the revision number you specified) and then merge those changes back into the original later, if you wish.
The other answer will work but it is excessive. All you need to do is:
hg up <revnum>
and your local working folder will be updated to the state of files at the specified revision. You can just work from there.
As soon as you commit it will create an anonymous branch automatically. Your original commits remain preserved but out of your way.
This is the simplest possible approach (IMHO) which I would recommend starting with.