How does Mercurial tell a file was modified?
The reason I am asking is because when I run hg status its telling me several files are modified.
However, when I run hg diff there are no changes to report.
I have a theory as why this is happening: (but I am not positive)
I am using NetBeans which has Mercurial support built in. When I edit a file, it shows it as modified, although if I undo (rather than revert) those changes and save it, NetBeans tells me there are no local changes. So I am guessing NetBeans uses diffs to check for modifications while Mercurial is using something else like modification-date.
Is this correct or is something else the cause?
Mercurial does not use modification date to determine the status. This can be verified with a simple experiment:
hg init
echo "This is a test" > test.txt
hg commit -Am "commit"
touch test.txt
hg status
The code which performs the status check is in dirstate.py. If the dirstate is unsure about a file's status (e.g. because only the modification time differs, then it passes it up to localrepo.status for further analysis as seen here.
The hg help status text has some clues that may help:
status may appear to disagree with
diff if permissions have changed or a
merge has occurred. The standard diff
format does not report permission
changes and diff only reports changes
relative to one merge parent.
When you run hg diff, are you specifying any command-line options?
Is it possible the permissions of the file changed? Try hg diff --git which shows the git-style extended diffs that support permissions and binaries. By default hg diff shows only patch-friendly diffs, which don't show permissions changes.
Related
I have been using the mercurial and Beyond Compare 4 tools together for about 2 weeks now and feel fairly confident in my usage, however I still seem to have a problem when comparing incoming changesets against my current local codebase. The problem is emphasized when I attempting a complicated merge.
Just to clarify, I am avoiding the use of tools such as TortoiseHg,
although I do have it installed. I am searching for feedback via cmd line operations only.
My current templated method to pull down the incoming changesets via the following ( as an [alias] )
hg in --verbose -T "\nchangeset: \t{rev}\nbranch: \t{branch}\nuser: \t\t{author}\ndate: \t\t{date(date,'%m-%d-%Y %I:%M%p')}\ndescription: \n\t{desc|fill76|tabindent}\n\n{files % ' \t{file}\n'}\n----------\n"
As an example, here is a simplified (and cleverly abstracted) block returned ::
changeset: 4685
branch: Feature-WI209825
user: Jack Handy <jhandy#anon.com>
date: 01-19-2015 10:19AM
description:
Display monkey swinging from vines while whistling dixie
Zoo/MonkeyCage/Resources/Localization.Designer.cs
Zoo/MonkeyCage/Resources/Localization.resx
Zoo/MonkeyCage/Utility/Extensions.cs
If I were to be comparing changes locally, I would simply use the following command ::
hg bcomp -r 4685 -r default <optional file name>
and then I would get an instance of Beyond Compare with a folder structure and files and I could just navigate accordingly to view the changes...however, when I attempt to do this with a changeset that has yet to be pulled into my local repository, I can't.
How do I diff incoming changesets with my local repository?
---- UPDATE --------------------------------
I pursued the idea of bundling the incoming changes and then trying to use BC4 to diff the bundle to any given branch/revision on my local repo.
hg in --bundle "C:\Sandboxes\Temp\temp.hg"
This creates a compressed file archive containing all the new changes.
Now I simply need to diff this bundle with my local, however am having difficulty optimizing this. Currently, I am using variations on the following command:
hg -R "C:\Sandboxes\Temp\temp.hg" bcomp -r default
Alas, I am still having difficulty perfecting this...any insight is appreciated.
I don't see how you can, since your local repository doesn't yet have that changeset, so mercurial can't create a local copy of the revision, as it doesn't have visibility of what the change actually is.
The -p flag to hg incoming will show you the patch for each revision, but that isn't what you want.
Why not just pull the remote changes anyway? It wont hurt unless you actually update. You can then do your diff in the normal way.
hg diff is a local operation.
But you can simply call hg incoming -p in order to obtain a diff view of what you're going to pull. See hg help incoming for more options and refinement (e.g. if you need to diff against a specific rev etc)
I have a repository where:
> hg st
shows that my working directory has some uncommitted changes, while
> hg diff
> hg diff -g
> hg diff --git
display nothing.
I read here: 4.10. hg status shows changed files but hg diff doesn't! the following:
hg status reports when file contents or flags have changed relative to either parent. hg diff only reports changed contents relative to the first parent. You can see flag information with the --git option to hg diff and deltas relative to the other parent with -r.
However, if I run hg parents it shows only one parent (the tip). As I mention above, I have also tried hg diff --git and it still displays nothing.
Note:
The above is on Mercurial version 2.0.1
hg status only shows M next to a regular file.
hg diff and hg diff -g print nothing
The filesystem is NFS.
hg parents prints only one parent
Some excerpts from Mercurial in daily use (Mercurial: the definitive guide) (copying here because there seems to be no way to give a convinient link to the end of the page):
The default output of the hg diff command is backwards compatible with the regular diff command, but this has some drawbacks.
The output of hg diff above obscures the fact that we simply renamed a file. The hg diff command accepts an option, --git or -g, to use a newer diff format that displays such information in a more readable form.
This option also helps with a case that can otherwise be confusing: a file that appears to be modified according to hg status, but for which hg diff prints nothing. This situation can arise if we change the file's execute permissions.
The normal diff command pays no attention to file permissions, which is why hg diff prints nothing by default. If we supply it with the -g option, it tells us what really happened.
To summarize, hg diff command misses several kinds of information on changes: attributes, permissions, file names, etc. These changes may exist even if you have a single parent. And hg status correctly takes into account all changes. To see what has happened, use hg diff -g. It's the answer to the question 'what happens'.
Seems like backwards compatibility is the 'why'. I'm not sure, but I suppose that the 'normal diff' is some widespread or built-in Unix/Linux tool (judging from the fact that both hg and git come from that world).
In these situations (it happens a lot to my team), I find that this command will fix about anything:
hg debugrebuilddirstate
or
hg debugrebuilddirstate -r tip
It's lightly documented in the help documentation, but basically I believe it clears out the "dirstate" file which caches information about working-directory files. The next time you hg stat it will refresh it from scratch.
One caveat: if you've added or removed files, that information will be lost when the dirstate is rebuilt.
If you have ignorews or ignoreblanklines set in .hgrc then hg status will show it as changed but hg diff won't (assuming the changes are only whitespace of course).
I just deleted the files that showed up as modified (make a backup if needed) which caused all the files to show up with an ! next to it when I ran
hg st
After that I ran the following command to revert the files (which were already checked in):
hg revert --all --no-backup
and that fixed the problem
In my case something was broken with hg. (same permissions and hg diff -g shows nothing).
I fixed issue with next way:
I cloned repository again in separate folder
I removed everything from this folder except .hg
I moved from old (broken) place everything except .hg to new place
So after this step i have repository which cloned with current version of mercurial + exactly same files.
After this steps i received same (empty) results for commands: hg st and hg diff -g
I tried to update some files to old revision in many ways, but I haven't found yet.
(not permanently, just temporarily updating for testing)
For example, the following is OK in SVN.
svn up -r 100 foo.cpp
U foo.cpp
But in Mercurial, 'up' command doesn't permit file name argument.
Only is it possible to update entire source tree in Mercurial?
You'd have to use hg revert:
hg revert -r 100 foo.cpp
Note that this gives you local changes, as can be seen by running hg diff.
See hg help revert for more info.
This is fundamentally disallowed by Mercurial and other DVCSs. Both CVS and Subversion track which revision you have checked out on a per-file basis. You could have r1 of file x and r2 of file y. In a DVCs the entire repository is at a single version, which in Mercurial you can see with hg id.
As #Tom points out you can have modified files from different revisions, but if you want to see another revision without changes showing up you need to do the update in another clone (which given that local clones use hard links to be (a) instant and (b) space efficient) that's not much of a hassle.
We have a Mercurial repository converted from Subversion a while ago and have today noticed that there are files in the repository that have no history whatsoever.
One of the sympomts of this behaviour is that hg status reports the file as clean, while hg log reports no changesets for the same file:
> hg clone [repo]
> hg st -c FileWithMissingHistory.cs
C FileWithMissingHistory.cs
> hg blame FileWithMissingHistory.cs
FileWithMissingHistory.cs: no such file in rev [...]
> hg log FileWithMissingHistory.cs
> hg log FileWithMissingHistory.cs -f
abort: cannot follow nonexistent file: "FileWithMissingHistory.cs"
> hg log -v | grep FileWithMissingHistory.cs
[gives output, there arechangesets mentioning the file]
Obviously the filenames have been changed in the example. I've tried using hg verify, but this command reports that the repo is fine. Has anyone experienced this and is there anything we could do to bring the history "back to life"? Placing dummy history on the files in question would be acceptable, but suboptimal.
EDIT:
I've done some more investigation and noticed that "FileWithMissingHistory.cs" was renamed from another filename (hg copy + delete) in revision 238. If I do hg update -r238 and hg log on the file at this revision I do not get any history. Doing hg log on the original file reports the history as expected, so it seems that the history is somehow lost during copy (again, the file is renamed using hg copy, and the changeset clearly indicates that the file has been copied).
Sounds strange, actually impossible. What I would try to debug this issue is to update to different revisions and check at which revision the file appears in the working copy the first time. If you do this in a binary search fashion (similar to how the bisect extension works), you should find a revision which introduces the file after a few updates.
This does not solve the problem, but it may help in tracking down its source.
I've finally tracked down the cause of the effects mentioned above and it seems that this is caused by mixed casing issues. Some of the files are located in directories with lowercase names while others are located in the directories with equal names, only that the case is mixed (e.g. "directory/FileWithHistory.cs" and "DiReCtOrY/FileWithMissingHistory.cs"). On Windows, both files will be located in the same directory causing issues.
I've just recently moved a lot of my Views and Controllers into more appropriate locations and am now wanting to pull down recent changes from our central repo.
I've done a hg pull which worked fine and asked me to do a hg update to bring the changes down locally. This in turn informed me that I needed to do a hg merge however when I try this, I get a message stating that
abort: outstanding uncommitted changes
When I check this using hg status I see in the list all of the files that I've moved (so they're now deleted from their old location).
How do I tell Mercurial that I've removed these files? Do I have to go through each one of them and manually do a remove? Is this something that's possible using only the command line rather than doing it with a GUI tool?
From the command line to automatically hg rm the files you've removed you'd:
hg addremove
It's likely your GUI (you didn't say which you use) exposes that functionality too.
However, that's not what's causing your message. You have some already made local changes that mercurial does know about (unlike the removed files which it doesn't know about until you tell it), and you need a hg commit before you can merge.