Pushing multiple heads with Mercurial - mercurial

For a workflow like this,
$hg clone <bitbucket repo>
... fix, fix ...
$hg commit -m "good comment!"
$hg bookmark stable
...new fix on stable...
$hg commit -m "new fix on stable bookmark"
$hg bookmark experimental --> I would like to defer merging until its stable.
... hack hack more hack ....
$hg commit -m "more hack on experimental"
$created new head
$hg push <bitbucket repo>
"abort: push creates new remote heads!"
(did you forget to merge? use push -f to force)
I've read a lot saying 'NEVER EVER use push -f to force'.
But yes, the experimental head needs to be pushed, as I don't want to merge untill its stable enough. I don't want to keep the changes on this bookmark on my machine for too long either (what happens if system got crashed?) and I'd like pull this bookmark and continue experiments later. Its a kind of 'centralized' approach though.
Whats the best way to deal with kind of situation ?
Is there any way to use bookmarks to deal this workflow? Don't want to use named branch.
Note: I just used 'push -f', but Bitbucket never shows this bookmarks on repositories 'Tags' link.

What you're doing is just fine. The "don't use push -f" is advice for people who have pulled, have multiple heads, and don't know what that means.
Bookmarks won't show up on bitbucket. The changesets will show up as heads, of course, but the boomarks aren't stored in the repo. When two version 1.6 or later Mercurial's push/pull changesets they transfer bookmarks out-of-band, but bitbucket doesn't have support for that yet (to my knowledge).

Related

Safe way to purge history - 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

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.

How do you delete a commit in Mercurial?

I want to completely delete a Mercurial commit as if it was never entered in the repository and move back to my prior commit.
Is this possible?
If it was your last commit and you haven't pushed it anywhere, you can do that with rollback. Otherwise, no. Not really. Time to change your passwords.
Edit: It has been pointed out that you can clone from an older revision and merge in the changes you want to keep. That's also true, unless you have pushed it to a repo you don't control. Once you push, your data is very likely to be very hard to get back.
You can try to remove mq info about your commit.
For this you need to go File->Settings->Extensions.
There check mq and restart gui.
After that just right click on unneeded commit and
ModifyHistory->Strip
To edit the history I would use the Histedit Extension extension.
hg histedit 45:c3a3a271d11c
However keep in mind this only makes sense in a situation where you have not yet pushed the commits to the public repository, you own the public repository and/or you can account for all the clones out there. If you receive the following error:
abort: can't rebase immutable changeset 43ab8134e7af
It means that Mecurial thinks this is a public changeset (see phases) that has already been pushed - you can force it to be a draft again doing:
hg phase -f -d 45:c3a3a271d11c
I encounter this fairly often. I make a commit and then pull to push. But then there is something incoming that makes my newly made commit unnecessary. A plain hg rollback isn't enough because it only undoes the pull...
This is the thing to do:
hg strip <rev>
Things are painless when you don't push your changesets anywhere.
If it's more than one commit and/or you already pushed it somewhere else, you can clone your repository and specify the last changeset that should be cloned.
See my answer here how to do this:
Mercurial: Fix a borked history
If you only committed locally and didn't push, you can just create a clone locally (as described in my link) and you're done.
If you already pushed to some remote repository, you would have to replace that with your clone.
Of course it depends if you are able (or allowed) to do this.
You can use "hg backout" to do a reverse merge basically. All options are discussed in the freely available book "Mercurial: The Definitive Guide":
http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/finding-and-fixing-mistakes.html
If using tortoise you can use modify history > strip...
Yes. Unless I am mistaken, as of v2.3 (rel. 2012/08/01) you can use the HisteditExtension with a drop command to drop a commit, along with strip or backout to remove changes.
A simple Google search on the feature: https://www.google.com/webhp#q=histedit+drop
In 2022 I do use evolve extension. It is one of the best extensions for this purpose.
To prune unwanted changeset, if you for example did a quick hack to get the code working:
$ echo 'debug hack' >> file1.c
$ hg commit -m 'debug hack'
Now you have a proper patch you can do hg prune .:
$ hg prune .
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
working directory is now at 2a39221aaebb
1 changesets pruned
If you push the change to the remote repository you will find only obsolescence markers:
$ hg push
searching for changes
no changes found
remote: 1 new obsolescence markers
To check the changes to your local repo you can pull from the remote one:
$ hg pull
pulling from ssh://userid#server/repo
searching for changes
no changes found

Copy Mercurial repository with uncommitted changes

I have an mercurial repositry a bitbucket.org and a clone on my wokstation. The clone has some uncommited (unfished) work in it. I have to copy these clone to my laptop because I will be on a trip for one or two weeks and want to do some work.
Is there a simple and save way to copy the repository with its uncommited changes to another device? I knew I could clone the repo from the workstation to my laptop but this won't copy uncommited work.
Simply copy the entire repository's folder.
Just commit that work. That work needs to be finished to be committed is left-over CVS/SVN thinking. Commit it, and then update to its parent and work on whatever else you want to work on. When eventually the work is done you're pushing a changegroup not individual changesets, so no one will have the uncompiling stage at the end of those interstitial changesets on them.
Avoiding committing work in Mercurial (using shelve, attic, copying repos, etc.) is the only way to lose work -- avoid it.
I prefer my first answer (commit it) but if you positively can't bring yourself to commit unfinished work then you should be using Mercurial Queues with a patch queue that lives in its own repository. This is easily done with:
hg qinit --create-repo
Then you import your uncomitted changes as a patch using:
hg qnew --force name-for-this-work
then you can:
hg qcommit -m "work in progress"
Then you can qclone that repo and get both the work in progress and the base repository on which it's overlayed. More details are available in the Mercurial book's chapter on queues.
Really, though, there's just never a good reason to have uncommitted work for more than an hour or two.