Mercurial Getting out of a bad merge - mercurial

I just merged branch A into B, and for some reason the merge did not go well. I want to revert B back to where it was before the merge and try again like it never happened before. I was thinking of just doing
hg clone myrepo newrepo -r A -r 12345
where 12345 is the revision number before B's bad merge commit
I think this works, but I have a lot of other branches (most of which are closed using commit --close-branch) and this puts those branches back to an inactive state.
Is there a way to clone everything except revision 123456 or something? (where 123456 is the bad commit on B)

Assuming you have not pushed the merge changeset to any public location, the easiest solution is to use the hg strip command that comes with the Mercurial Queues (i.e. mq) extension.
From the wiki:
hg strip rev removes the rev revision
and all its descendants from a
repository. To remove an unwanted
branch, you would specify the first
revision specific to that branch. By
default, hg strip will place a backup
in the .hg/strip-backup/ directory. If
strip turned out to be a bad idea, you
can restore with hg unbundle
.hg/strip-backup/filename.

It might not be as nice as hg rollback, but usually what I do is update to head A, merge in previous head B, check that I got it right this time, and then dummy-merge away the bad merge.

I hope I'm understanding your situation correctly. If I am you should be able to update to the revision of B before the merge, give that revision a new branch name, merge A in to it, and continue on. You'll probably want to mark the original B branch as closed.
$ hg up 12345 #12345 is the revision of B prior to the merge
$ hg branch B-take2
$ hg merge A
$ hg commit -m 'merge A in to B-take2'
$ hg up B
$ hg commit --close-branch -m 'mark original B branch as closed'

Is it too late to use the hg rollback command? If so, try the hg backout command.

Related

Mercurial undo a series of commits

I have a mercurial repo with the following history (most recent commit at the top) on a feature branch:
mergeDefaultA
|
mergeDefaultB
|
C
|
mergeDefaultD
mergeDefaultXXXX are merge commits that came as the result of merging the default branch into the feature branch.
What has happened is commit C is screwed, but this was not noticed until after I had pushed mergeDefaultA to Bitbucket. What I want is the following picture:
exactlyWhatIsInMergeDefaultD
|
mergeDefaultA
|
mergeDefaultB
|
C
|
mergeDefaultD
Where exactlyWhatIsInMergeDefaultD is literally exactly what was the state of the code in mergeDefaultD. However, everything I'm reading seems to indicate either you can't undo a series of commits like this (only a single commit back) and even then many of the options aren't available once you've pushed "into the wild".
How do I achieve this?
If this was git, I'd do:
git revert mergeDefaultD
How do I do the same in Mercurial?
Here's what I think you want:
hg revert -r GOOD_REVISION_NUMBER --all
hg commit -A -m "reverting back to revision GOOD_REVISION_NUMBER"
Once that is committed, as soon as someone pulls from you (or you push to them) they will get the most recent revision containing only the good stuff. If they ever do want to go back to the bad stuff, you could always update to that revision:
hg update -r BAD_REVISION_NUMBER
To expand a bit on Harvtronix' answer (which is fine, by the way):
One simple way is to revert to the old revision number ('GOOD') and commit. Note: reverting means that you set the files to the same content as in revision 'GOOD', you don't go back down the tree to that commit. If you did, you would indeed branch off and have two heads.
hg revert -r GOOD --all
hg commit -m "all is good now"
Another way can be to only throw out revision C (if I read your explanation correctly, it's actually just C that is causing the issue). 'hg backout'will introduce the reverse of C in your working directory, so you can then commit it.
hg backout -r C
hg commit -m "Backed out C"
Finally, one last option is to close the bad branch, update to the last commit that was fine and commit further there:
hg up -r BAD
hg commit --close-branch -m "This head is bad"
hg up -r GOOD
... continue here ...

Rename hg branch and transplant selective changes

I am working on BRANCH_A. I want to move the last 50 commits on this branch to a new branch BRANCH_B and revert BRANCH_A to the previous commit before these. What is the best method to achieve the same? Is it a good way?
Supposing that you just want BRANCH_A to be at the state of "HEAD - 50 commits" and you do not care if those commits appear in the history, then here is a simple solution:
For having all the commits on a new branch BRANCH_B you can simply create this branch while at the HEAD of BRANCH_A:
$ hg branch BRANCH_B
For restoring a previous state on BRANCH_A you can switch back to the HEAD of BRANCH_A, and commit a new changeset that will undo all the ones you do not want, this is done with hg backout:
$ hg update BRANCH_A
$ hg log -r 'branch(BRANCH_A) and head()~50 and not merge()'
$ hg backout -r 'branch(BRANCH_A) and head()~50 and not merge()'
$ hg commit -m"removed from .. to .."
You might have conflicts if changes happen in similar zones.
If you do want to rewrite history, you can either use the rebase or convert extensions to change names, remove commits etc. It all depends if you are working only locally or if you need to push to a server which is used by other people as well (in which case it is not advised to rewrite history).
Without editing history, simply:
Close the tip of BRANCH_A.
Create a named BRANCH_B off the closed tip of BRANCH_A.
Check in new commits to BRANCH_A starting from the node before the 50 commits.

Mercurial: Switch working directory to branch without losing changes?

Let's say that I have a named branch 'B1' which I'm doing feature development on.
I am at a good stopping point before a demo though not done with the feature so I:
hg up default
hg merge B1
hg ci -m "merged in feature drop"
hg push
Now I continue working for a half an hour or so and go to commit only to realize that I forgot to update back to B1 and that my current working directory is on default - uhoh. In theory I should be able to just mark my working directory parent as the tip of B1 - is there an easy way to do this?
I could of course commit, update back to B1, and merge my changes back, but then there's an unstable changeset in default and this happens often enough to me that I would like a real solution.
Two ways. First, the obvious way:
hg diff > foo
hg up -C b1
hg import --no-commit foo
rm foo
Second, the magical way:
hg up -r 'ancestor(., b1)' # take working dir back to the fork point
hg up b1 # take it forward to the branch head
This way involves merges. Depending on how much your branches have diverged, this may be painless. Or it may be complicated, and you may make a mess of your changes that you haven't saved anywhere. Which is why even magicians like myself prefer to do it the first way.
I would use the shelve extension. I think it’s distributed along with TortoiseHg, you can also use it from the UI:
hg shelve --all
hg up B1
hg unshelve
Rebase extension allow you to change parent for any commit for wrongly commited changeset.
If you want just change branch for future commit - MQ (as mentioned) or Shelve
Typically for this sort of dynamic approach, I favor mercurial queues.
In your situation, what I would do would be to create a patch on default with the changes, pop the patch off, switch over to B1, and apply the patch.
It goes something like:
hg qnew OOPSPATCH
hg qrefresh
hg qpop
hg up B1
hg qpush
<hack hack>
hg qrefresh
hg qfinish
All you need is simple hg up -m B1
From hg up --help:
options:
…
-m --merge merge uncommitted changes
…

Can changes made by strip be reflected in the public repo?

Let's say I have this:
hg clone public_repo my_repo
touch a b c d
hg add .
hg commit -m a a
hg commit -m b b
hg commit -m c c
hg commit -m d d
hg push
# let's say revX is the revision that added a
hg strip revX
In my repository's history, the commits are gone. However, if I try to do a push after the strip, it tells me no changes found. Can the strip be applied to the public repo?
EDIT: the question is just hypothetical :). I am not in this situation, I just thought it would be interesting to find out how this works.
You need to run hg strip there. If it's bitbucket repo, you can do it from the admin panel. If not, SSH.
This is not possible. You have to strip the public repo as well.
hg strip just takes away changesets. It does not perform an "adding" operation which could be pushed.
In the exact example you provide, you could just hg rollback on the public repo.
Let me pretend you're asking a slightly different question: I've stripped part of my repository history, how do I propagate this change to other dev's repositories?
Mercurial offers no way of propagating stripping in the same way it propagates adding changesets. So you have to come up with your own way.
Bitbucket, for example, has an updates list (on the repo summary page, if my memory serves me well). If you do a strip, Bitbucket displays there something like this:
Changeset 12345abcdef was stripped from the repository, please run hg strip 12345abcdef locally.
When we had to propagate stripping of part of an old branch in our shop, here's what we did:
Stripped the changesets on the server.
Created a batch file named strip.bat on the default branch of the repo containing the command we'd run on the server, i.e. hg strip 1234567890.
Told everybody that whenever they cannot push because “push creates new remote heads” for no apparent reason, this means they should run strip.bat.
In case we ever need to strip something again, we just add another hg strip in the batch file.
P.S. Yes it's better not to strip, e.g. use backout to commit inverse changesets. Sometimes that's not an option: if you mistakenly merged branch a into branch b when you wanted the merge b into a, you're trapped. Even if you backout the merge changeset on feature, the merged changesets from a are already marked as merged, and you'll have a hard time doing another merge of these branches.
The correct and safe way to remove unwanted changes that made it to the wild is to hg backout them.
Sometimes it is not possible to strip or backout a change, for example if it was a merge revision and you don't have admin access to the server. One method that does work is to branch the last good revision and then close the bad head.
hg up badrev^ (Go to the revision before the bad one)
touch dummy && hg add dummy && hg ci -m 'dummy' && hg rm dummy && hg ci --amend -m 'Fix accidental merge' (Create a second head with no changes from the good revision)
hg up badrev (Go to the bad revision)
hg ci --close-branch -m 'Close bad head' (Close the bad head)
hg push

mercurial -- "merge" by abandoning one changeset

I have two heads, let's call them "A" (the good head) and "B" (the bad head). I want to merge them by taking everything from A and nothing from B. Basically, my merge of A and B is A.
When I try hg merge, it starts asking me about this file and that, and inevitably I get into trouble. I don't want any of that! How can I tell it to merge them and end up with A, preferably without any intermediate steps?
From the Mercurial tips at section 22. Keep "My" or "Their" files when doing a merge.
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/TipsAndTricks
Occasionally you want to merge two heads, but you want to throw away all changes from one of the heads, a so-called dummy merge. You can override the merge by using the ui.merge configuration entry:
$ hg --config ui.merge=internal:local merge #keep my files
$ hg --config ui.merge=internal:other merge #keep their files
Here local means parent of working directory, other is the head you want to merge with. This will leave out updates from the other head.
To merge X into the current revision without letting any of the changes from X come through, do:
hg --config ui.merge=internal:fail merge X
hg revert --all --rev .
The other approach is mentioned in : https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/PruningDeadBranches
$ hg update -C tip # jump to one head
$ hg merge otherhead # merge in the other head
$ hg revert -a -r tip # undo all the changes from the merge
$ hg commit -m "eliminate other head" # create new tip identical to the old
One thing I came across and started using recently on some personal repos was just using the close-branch switch with commit. e.g.
$ hg update B
$ hg commit --close-branch -m "Abandoning branch"
In my reasoning, if you're blowing away one branch in favor of the other entirely, it's simply not a merge and it's silly to call it that. I'm relatively new to hg myself, and I seem to recall that --close-branch has not been around since the beginning and maybe that's why it doesn't have as much traction as the merging gyrations I usually see.