How can I remove the working copy from a Mercurial clone? - mercurial

When cloning a repository with mercurial you can pass the -U/--noupdate flag to create a clone with no working copy. Can I remove the working copy if I forget to pass this flag at clone time? And if so, how?
This is conceptually similar to this git question, but for mercurial.

Documentation at Mercurial wiki says following about bare repositories:
"Although this is a minor issue, Mercurial can obviously handle a
bare repository; that is, a repository without a working copy. In Git
you need a configuration option for that, whereas in Hg you only need
to check out the null revision, like this:"
hg update null
The null revision is similar to the empty state you have when you have just done hg init. It is the parent of revision 0 (and the second parent of all non-merge revisions) and by updating back to it you again get an empty working copy.
The link may look ironic:
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/GitConcepts

rm -rf *
This removes all "visible" files (under *nix). Since the Mercurial repository is stored in the "hidden" file .hg, it won't be touched. Unfortunately, neither will any hidden files of your own, such as .hgignore.
To restore the working copy, I'm sure there's an hg update flag that works, but this will as well:
hg revert --all

Related

How to undo all added files in Mercurial

Say I type hg add in Mercurial, and there a bunch of untracked files in my working directory that are not ignored. What is the easiest way to un-add all those files without explicitly typing the name of each file?
Can I just un-add them all with one command?
Preface
You must always ask questions, which contain as much information as possible. Because now your question, depending from some conditions, may have totally different answers.
Case One - no local modifications in already versioned files, only added (and not committed) files
hg revert will return your working directory to the state after the last commit, undoing all changes it it.
Case One - local edits, which you want to save and occasionally added files
Read about filesets in Mercurial.
Use fileset in the hg forget command, something like hg forget "set:added()".
Use hg revert or hg forget on the files (both do the same for a file you ran hg add on). To avoid typing out the filenames, you can use a fileset like this:
$ hg revert "set:added()"
This will revert the file back to how it looked in the working copy parent revision, i.e., it will become unknown again.
hg revert -r .^ path-to-file will revert the commit from the commit-set.
then commit and submit (if using jelly fish) and you'll see the files removed from the changeset. I don't know why .^ works yet, but somebody will probably know.
You could always just re-clone your repository and then replace (delete existing and then copy new) the .hg directory in your working folder with the one from the fresh clone... (assuming you have no pending commits..)

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

Mercurial `hg clone` but ignoring all subrepos?

Is there a way to clone a repo that comes with subrepos, but without having Mercurial pull all the subrepos?
It appears that while hg clone -U can be used to obtain an empty clone of a repo, there's nothing that would convince hg update to avoid starting off by pulling all of the subrepos.
I should point out that it is crucial to retain the ability to easily sync to the head revision after creating such a clone.
This should do what you want:
REM Take a new clone, but do not update working directory
hg clone --noupdate %REPO_PATH% %DESTINATION%
REM Update working directory but exclude the certain subprojects
hg revert --all --rev %BRANCH% --exclude %SUBREPO_PATH_1% --exclude %SUBREPO_PATH_2%
This answer may add more than the question required, but provides some valuable notes on working with Mercurial when you can't update do to a bad subrepository path or revision.
Step 1: Clone the repository without any updates
hg clone --noupdate source_repository destination_repository
Step 2: Use revert to get the right files
hg revert --all --rev revision_number --exclude subrepo_1 --exclude subrepo_2 ...
At this point, you have a new changeset; you may need to make sure the parent revision is correct. When I did this, my new changeset's parent was changeset 0. To fix this I had to set the parent changeset AND switch branches (since my changeset was on a different branch).
Step 3: Change the parent of the current changes
hg debugsetparents revision_number
hg branch branch_name
That should do it.
Found a hacky way. It still requires all subrepos to be checked out once, but afterwards they can be deleted.
Clone the whole lot, including subrepos. No way around this.
Delete subrepos
hg remove .hgsub
I tried to convince Mercurial to hg remove .hgsub before the subrepos are cloned, but the best I got is not removing .hgsub: file is untracked.
If you have a subrepo, a working directory must include some version of that subrepo. That version may be a fixed older revision if specified, or the tip if not.
You cannot update your repo without getting the subrepos; if you had a complete working dir without them, you shouldn't be using subrepos - use truly external repos instead.
If your subrepos are pegged against a certain remote version, then updates after the first will not trigger a subrepo update - they're already up-to-date. But for the initial creation of the working directory, you will have to do a remote pull.
You can trick Mercurial by munging the hgsubstate file. But really, your model and the conceptual model differ, so you're probably not a good match for subrepos if this is a concern.
edit: If you find yourself cloning and then updating to the tip many times, try using local branches or mq instead. That way you only have to do the initial clone once.

Mercurial bulk delete

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.

How do I get changes to propagate to all subrepos in Mercurial?

I have recently switched from Subversion to Mercurial for source control and in doing so have split up one repository into several. I used subrepos to manage the dependencies between repositories. The problem is that pull is not suprepo aware so I have to go into each subrepo and pull changes in order to update a repository. Is there a better way to do this?
pull is not suprepo aware
hg pull should be subrepo aware, provided it is used with the -u (--update) option.
The hg update should, when it comes to subrepos, take them into account:
Whenever newer Mercurial versions encounter this .hgsubstate file when updating your working directory, they'll attempt to pull the specified subrepos and update them to the appropriate state.
Subrepos may also contain their own subrepos and Mercurial will recurse as necessary.
The OP CoreyD adds:
That has not worked for me.
I create two repos /repo and /sub and I clone sub into repo (/repo/sub).
Then I create an .hgsub file in /repo with this a line like this sub = ../sub and commit it.
When I make changes to /sub and then do an update in /repo /repo/sub is unchanged.
Am I doing something wrong?
That looks about right:
SubRepos or submodules (for Git) are all about referening a precise configuration (changeset ref for hg, or commit ref for Git, as explained in this SO question)
When you change anything outside of /repo, you don't change the .hgsubstate file within /repo recording the exact configuration (changeset reference).
Hence no change at all.
You could rather do your /sub changes directly in /repo/sub, commit them, then commit /repo.
Then, a clone of /repo would have the new configuration.