I started getting creative with my glob syntax in my .hgignore file to compress groups of lines (similar extensions, etc) into one. However, in reading the WP Glob syntax article section, I'm left with the question if this will break on my colleagues' Windows boxes.
Is Mercurial parsing the globs itself or does it leave it to the OS?
Mercurial does the parsing itself, or at least in a cross-platform way through its python code. I've shared complex ignores across platforms without problems.
Related
I was wondering if Mercurial or any of its extensions support a mechanism to specify with globbing rules what files to track (i.e. a file that serves the opposite purpose of .hgignore).
I understand that I can use regular expressions in .hgignore to specify files to ignore (and hence, by exclusion, which ones to track), but I like the globbing sintax Mercurial supports for .hgignore, and was wondering if I could use the same syntax to specify which files to track.
Use a negative look-ahead assertion in .hgignore. For example, you could use the following to only include C++ source files. Note that all files you intend to match must be in the one regex.
(?!.*\.([ch](pp|xx)?|C|H))
However, I don't think you can do this with the globbing syntax.
I googled a bit, but didn't find any suggestions on that topic. Is multi line regex possible in .hgignore?
I'm writing a magento module, and wan't to include only my module code in repository, so I came up with this regex, but it would a be mess, if I had to write it in one line.
syntax: regexp
^(?!(
app/code/local/Mage/Myreviews/|
app/design/frontend/default/default/layout/myreviews\.xml|
app/design/frontend/default/default/template/myreviews/|
app/etc/modules/Mage_Myreviews\.xml|
skin/frontend/default/default/css/myreviews/|
skin/frontend/default/default/myreviews/|
js/myreviews/
)).*
As for the canonical answer to your question, are multi-line regular expressions supported? No. For confirmation, take a look at the ignorepats function in ignore.py in the mercurial Python package—it iterates over the lines in the file one by one.
As for what you should do instead, #jk.'s answer is good (and the glob: * that you've come up with).
You can add files to a repository and have mercurial track them even if they match an ignore rule, so usually the best way to do this sort of thing is to ignore a bit too much e.g. (don't know anything about magneto modules so this may be wrong)
syntax: glob
app/*
skin/*
js/myreviews/*
and then explicitly hg add the files you do want.
As Joel points out hg adds --include and --exclude options are also useful in these scenarios
pre-emptive additional info: hg forget will undo tracking a file without deleting it
I'm trying to set up .hgignore correctly, but I'm having some problems. I don't want to see executables in my list of unadded files.
On Windows, this is very easy: *.exe. On Linux, executables typically do not have an extension. So how do you set up a filter that will ignore files that have no extension?
There's no way to do it. You could, relatively easily, build a list of the executable files that exist now and automatically add them to your .hgignore but new ones will still show up as un-tracked.
I have occasionally tweaked my project build files (Makefiles, .sconstructs, etc.) to build UNIX executables as foo.x rather than foo, just to make automatically ignoring them easier.
I am writing a set of django apps and would like to use Hg for version control. I would like each app to be independent of the others so in each app there may be a directory for static media that contains images that I would not want under version control. In other words, the binary files would not all be in one central location
I would like to find a way to clone the repository that would include copies of the image files. It also would be great if when I did a merge, if there were an image file in one repo and not another, that there would be some sort of warning.
Currently I use a python script to find images and other binary files that are in one repo, but not the other. But a lot of people must face this problem, so there must be a more robust and elegant solution.
One one other thing...for reasons I do not want to go into, usually one of my repos is on a windows machine, and the other is on Linux. So a crossplatform solution would be nice.
Since Mercurial 2.0 the extension largefiles is now included in the main distribution. That extension keeps and manages large files outside of the "normal" repository in a way that you get the benefit of DCVS but without the benefit of exponential size and processing time growth.
Other extension that work along similar lines are SnapExtension and BigFilesExtension. However, those two are not distributed with Mercurial (you have to get them manually).
Mercurial can track any kind of file, for binary files if something changes then the whole file gets replaced not just the changes.
On the getting a warning if one repo doesn't contain a file, that's kind of the point of a DVCS is that the repos are related but are autonomous. You could always check and see what files were added during a synch or merge operation.
The current Mercurial book (by Bryan O'Sullivan) says, that Mercurial stores diffs also for binary files. How efficient this is, obviously depends on the nature of changes to binary files.
This is not quite a specifc question, and more me like for a criticism of my current approach.
I would like to include the program version number in the program I am developing. This is not a commercial product, but a research application so it is important to know which version generated the results.
My method works as follows:
There is a "pre-commit" hook in my .hg/hgrc file link to version_gen.sh
version_gen.sh consists solely of:
hg parent --template "r{rev}_{date|shortdate}" > version.num
In the makefile, the line version="%__VERSION__% in the main script is replaced with the content of the version.num file.
Are there better ways of doing this? The only real short coming I can see is that if you only commit a specfic file, version.num will be updated, but it won't be commited, and if I tried to add always committing that file, that would result in an infite loop (unless I created some temp file to indicate I was already in a commit, but that seems ugly...).
The problem
As you've identified, you've really created a Catch-22 situation here.
You can't really put meaningful information in the version.num file until the changes are committed and because you are storing version.num in the repository, you can't commit changes to the repository until you have populated the version.num file.
My solution
What I would suggest is:
Get rid of the "pre-commit" hook and hg forget the version.num file.
Add version.num to your .hgignore file.
Adjust version_gen.sh to consist of:
hg parent --template "r{node|short}_{date|shortdate}" > version.num
In the makefile, make sure version_gen.sh is run before version.num is used to set the version parameter.
My reasons
As #Ry4an suggests, getting the build system to insert revision information into the software at build time, using information from the Version Control System is a much better option. The only problem with this is if you try to compile the code from an hg archive of the repository, where the build system cannot extract the relevant information.
I would be inclined to discourage this however - in my own build system, the build failed if revision information couldn't be extracted.
Also, as #Kai Inkinen suggests, using the revision number is not portable. Rev 21 on one machine might be rev 22 on another. While this may not be a problem right now, it could be in the future, if you start colaborating with other people.
Finally, I explain my reasons for not liking the Keyword extension in a question of mine, which touches on similar issues to your own question:
I looked at Mercurials Keyword extension, since it seemed like the obvious solution. However the more I looked at it and read peoples opinions, the more that I came to the conclusion that it wasn't the right thing to do.
I also remember the problems that keyword substitution has caused me in projects at previous companies. ...
Also, I don't particularly want to have to enable Mercurial extensions to get the build to complete. I want the solution to be self contained, so that it isn't easy for the application to be accidentally compiled without the embedded version information just because an extension isn't enabled or the right helper software hasn't been installed.
Then in comments to an answer which suggested using the keyword extension anyway:
... I rejected using the keyword extension as it would be too easy to end up with the string "$Id$" being compiled into the executable. If keyword expansion was built into mercurial rather than an extension, and on by default, I might consider it, but as it stands it just wouldn't be reliable. – Mark Booth
A don't think that there can be a more reliable solution. What if someone accidentally damages .hg or builds not from a clone but from an archive? – Mr.Cat
#Mr.Cat - I don't think there can be a less reliable solution than the keywords extension. Anywhere you haven't explicitly enabled the extension (or someone has disabled it) then you get the literal string "$ID$" compiled into the object file without complaint. If mercurial or the repo is damaged (not sure which you meant) you need to fix that first anyway. As for hg archive, my original solution fails to compile if you try to build it from an archive! That is precisely what I want. I don't want any source to be compiled into our apps without it source being under revision control! – Mark Booth
What you are trying to do is called Keyword Expansion, which is not supported in Mercurial core.
You can integrate that expansion in make file, or (simpler) with the Keyword extension.
This extension allows the expansion of RCS/CVS-like and user defined keys in text files tracked by Mercurial.
Expansion takes place in the working directory or/and when creating a distribution using "hg archive"
That you use a pre-commit hook is what's concerning. You shouldn't be putting the rest of version_gen.sh into the source files thesemves, just into the build/release artifacts which you can do more accurately with an 'update' hook.
You don't want the Makefile to actually change in the repo with each commit, that just makes merges hell. You want to insert the version after checking out the files in advance of a build, which is is what an update hook does.
In distributed systems like Mercurial, the actual "version number" does not necessarily mean the same thing in every environment. Even if this is a single person project, and you are really careful with having only your central repo, you would still probably want to use the sha1-sum instead, since that is truly unique for the given repository state. The sha1 can be fetched through the template {node}
As a suggestion, I think that a better workflow would be to use tags instead, which btw are also local to your repository until you push them upstream. Don't write your number into a file, but instead tag your release code with a meaningful tag like
RELEASE_2
or
RELEASE_2010-04-01
or maybe script this and use the template to create the tag?
You can then add the tag to your non-versioned (in .hgignore) version.num file to be added into the build. This way you can give meaningful names to the releases and you tie the release to the unique identifier.