Mercurial: update to a revision, but not modify local files - mercurial

Suppose the repository has 20 revisions. The current revision on the record is revision 10, while the actual local files are based on the latest revision 20. I do not want to branch from revision 10. I want to continue the revision 20.
Currently what I'm doing is to copy all the files out of the revision directory, run hg update -C (which updates the revision number), remove all the files in the repository directory, copy all the files back, then commit. You can tell this is annoying and time wasteful. Is there a way to only update the revision number, but not modify any local file?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: there are many use cases (I mainly use TortoiseHg).
1) I mistakenly choose "No" when prompted to remove files from repository during a commit. I can use the strip from mq to remove the revision, but that will revert all commited files. Instead, I want to "re-parent" to the previous revision, commit again, then strip the unwanted revision. This may happen to anybody anytime, not just me, not just once.
2) I had a development machine A. I started the project on it, and switch to machine B after several months. The code on A becomes old, and the code on B has uncommited changed. If I want to continue development on A, I need to copy the code to A via Flash or network, etc. Now I want to commit on A without branching (because the code on A is actually based on the current tip). This happens maybe less frequently, but still not "once" problem, and more possibly when involved in a big project.
3) The repository has 2 branches C and D. There are roughly 2000 files. The current tip is in C. I want to overwrite some files in D with the same-named files in C (because C is more implemented) while preserving other files unchanged, then make the new tip in D. I have several options. I could update to D, compare the last revision of D with the current tip, make change and commit. The update would take some time, and the difficulty of comparison heavily relies on the comparison tool. I could also compare first, make change, backup the entire directory, update to D, then restore the entire directory. This is even more cumbersome. But if I could "re-parent" to D, I just need to make change and commit. This does not rely on comparison tool because the commit window in TortoiseHg has diff list.
There could be more use cases if you want to think. I hope Mercurial provides such "re-parent" feature (supposedly a new option for hg update), or at least convenient alternative.

You might find this article useful. The original link no longer exists, so it now references the Internet Archive's copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170805042314/http://hgtip.com/tips/advanced/2010-04-23-debug-command-tricks
In particular, to "reparent" your current working directory, issue:
hg debugsetparent 20
hg debugrebuildstate

You can use hg debugsetparents to set the parent revision of your working copy.

Related

Mercurial Repo Living Archive

We have an Hg repo that is over 6GB and 150,000 changesets. It has 8 years of history on a large application. We have used a branching strategy over the last 8 years. In this approach, we create a new branch for a feature and when finished, close the branch and merge it to default/trunk. We don't prune branches after changes are pushed into default.
As our repo grows, it is getting more painful to work with. We love having the full history on each file and don't want to lose that, but we want to make our repo size much smaller.
One approach I've been looking into would be to have two separate repos, a 'Working' repo and an 'Archive' repo. The Working repo would contain the last 1 to 2 years of history and would be the repo developers cloned and pushed/pulled from on a daily basis. The Archive repo would contain the full history, including the new changesets pushed into the working repo.
I cannot find the right Hg commands to enable this. I was able to create a Working repo using hg convert <src> <dest> --config convert.hg.startref=<rev>. However, Mecurial sees this as a completely different repo, breaking any association between our Working and Archive repos. I'm unable to find a way to merge/splice changesets pushed to the Working repo into the Archive repo and maintain a unified file history. I tried hg transplant -s <src>, but that resulted in several 'skipping emptied changeset' messages. It's not clear to my why the hg transplant command felt those changeset were empty. Also, if I were to get this working, does anyone know if it maintains a file's history, or is my repo going to see the transplanted portion as separate, maybe showing up as a delete/create or something?
Anyone have a solution to either enable this Working/Archive approach or have a different approach that may work for us? It is critical that we maintain full file history, to make historical research simple.
Thanks
You might be hitting a known bug with the underlying storage compression. 6GB for 150,000 revision is a lot.
This storage issue is usually encountered on very branchy repositories, on an internal data structure storing the content of each revision. The current fix for this bug can reduce repository size up to ten folds.
Possible Quick Fix
You can blindly try to apply the current fix for the issue and see if it shrinks your repository.
upgrade to Mercurial 4.7,
add the following to your repository configuration:
[format]
sparse-revlog = yes
run hg debugupgraderepo --optimize redeltaall --run (this will take a while)
Some other improvements are also turned on by default in 4.7. So upgrade to 4.7 and running the debugupgraderepo should help in all cases.
Finer Diagnostic
Can you tell us what is the size of the .hg/store/00manifest.d file compared to the full size of .hg/store ?
In addition, can you provide use with the output of hg debugrevlog -m
Other reason ?
Another reason for repository size to grow is for large (usually binary file) to be committed in it. Do you have any them ?
The problem is that the hash id for each revision is calculated based on a number of items including the parent id. So when you change the parent you change the id.
As far as I'm aware there is no nice way to do this, but I have done something similar with several of my repos. The bad news is that it required a chain of repos, batch files and splice maps to get it done.
The bulk of the work I'm describing is ideally done one time only and then you just run the same scripts against the same existing repos every time you want to update it to pull in the latest commits.
The way I would do it is to have three repos:
Working
Merge
Archive
The first commit of Working is a squash of all the original commits in Archive, so you'll be throwing that commit away when you pull your Working code into the Archive, and reparenting the second Working commit onto the old tip of Archive.
STOP: If you're going to do this, back up your existing repos, especially the Archive repo before trying it, it might get trashed if you run this over the top of it. It might also be fine, but I'm not having any problems on my conscience!
Pull both Working and Archive into the Merge repo.
You now have a Merge repo with two completely independent trees in it.
Create a splicemap. This is just a text file giving the hash of a child node and the hash of its proposed parent node, separated by a space.
So your splicemap would just be something like:
hash-of-working-commit-2 hash-of-archive-old-tip
Then run hg convert with the splicemap option to do the reparenting of the second commit of Working onto the old tip of the Archive. E.g.
hg convert --splicemap splicemapPath.txt --config convert.hg.saverev=true Merge Archive
You might want to try writing it to a different named repo rather than Archive the first time, or you could try writing it over a copy of the existing Archive, I'm not sure if it'll work but if it does it would probably be quicker.
Once you've run this setup once, you can just run the same scripts over the existing repos again and again to update with the latest Working revisions. Just pull from Working to Merge and then run the hg convert to put it into Archive.

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.

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).

Condensing Mercurial revision history

We have 2,700+ revisions and it takes a good 30-45 seconds to load Mercurial when doing a merge, push or anything else with TortoiseHg. I'm wondering if there's a way other than straight up creating a new repository to clean up the revision history. Say, cut off files under revision 2,400 or so.
Not an answer to your question, but:
Maybe reducing "log batch size" to 100 (default is 500) in the settings helps.
Our 2300+ rev repo loads in 2-3 secs (off my 15k rpm SAS-disk, but never mind that), so I don't think your problem is many revs, really. There are much bigger repos out there. :)
Note that both Mercurial core and TortoiseHg developers are keen on finding performance bugs, so it might be worthwhile to ask on the mail-lists for assistance.
You can use the histedit extension to compress several changesets into one. Executing the histedit command on a range of revisions will spawn a text document that looks like this (from the histedit documentation):
pick c561b4e977df Add beta
pick 030b686bedc4 Add gamma
pick 7c2fd3b9020c Add delta
Edit history between c561b4e977df and 7c2fd3b9020c
Commands:
p, pick = use commit
e, edit = use commit, but stop for amending
f, fold = use commit, but fold into previous commit
d, drop = remove commit from history
Changing pick to fold for a certain changeset in the list above will fold it into the previous changeset. It will give you an opportunity to resolve failed merges and enter a new commit message as well.
WARNING:
Using histedit will modify the repository history, including hash IDs, which will cause problems unless you re-start each developer with a new repository clone after the changes have been made. Also, you would probably need to limit your histedit-ing to changesets with a single parent (ie: non-merge changesets).

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.