We have an XML file which contains the settings of a tool we use. The tool is nice, but if you change some settings when using it it's quite easy to save those settings to the XML-file by mistake (you get a question, but it's easy to answer yes).
Is there a way to alert the user someway that she is commiting a change to this specific file? We want it versioned, but we also want centralized and we want the settings to be quite stable.
It's a file versioned in Windows on an NTFS partition, if that matters. Trying to set the file to "read only" doesn't seem to work (after I set it, hg st still says no changes). Any ideas?
The way this is usually handled is to put that file in your .hgignore and to not version it. Instead, you should version a template file. i.e., config.xml.template.
That way, the only way changes will get committed to it is for someone to consciously bring those changes into the template.
If you really want to catch it during commit, you'll need to write some hooks and get your users to install those locally.
Related
Is there any way I can copy the current change list to a text file in every commit?
I am using Mercurial HG, and an ASP.NET MVC and SQL-based web project. If this is possible, then I can always check the current change list by just checking the text file.
Any thoughts on this? Any other idea to achieve this?
It's a bit hard to get your question but I believe patches are what you're searching for.
You can create a patch in every source versioning software (hg/git/svn/etc.).
If you want to do that automatically on each commit, do a hook (this is also supported by all the source versioning softwares).
If you just want to check the changes, simply try the diff command (e.g., hg diff) that dumps the diff of the current changeset to the console. You can redirect it to a file too. There are some nice GUI tools for that (e.g., git gui for git).
I would like to embed some version information on top of my source code file with information such as version number, author, and date of edit.
Is there a simple way to do this with Mercurial?
This has been asked a lot here on Stackoverflow and the short answer is: you shouldn't do it.
You don't want a file that changes with every commit it makes merging a nightmare.
Better options are:
write the version string to a file on update
have you build/deploy script run $(hg id) and put that into the build at that time
Trust me, revision strings in files is CVS/SVN thinking. It has no place in a git / Mercurial world.
As comments and other answers mention, it is not a good idea to rely on CVS-like, automatically expanded, tags. Specially since you can extract whatever meta-information you need at any time and almost any granularity afterwards.
However, if you really need it (because your boss says so, for instance), the closest you can get is by making use of the keyword extension that comes bundled with mercurial.
My favorite way is to use the hgversioninfo plugin.
It generates a version.py file on the fly on "hg commit", "hg update", etc.
Yes it is possible, but you need to enable it. What you are asking for is basically the keyword extension. Be careful when enabling this the first time (read the section about kwshrink, kwexpand), because you wouldn't want the actual expanded keywords to become part of the revision history.
I have my index.cshtml file and I made a ton of changes to it. However, I want to scrap it and return to the a working (commited) version of this single file.
How can I use Mercurial to accomplish this?
I'm using Visual Studio 2011 with VisualHG.
The command is called hg revert, you should be able to find something like that in VisualHg.
It looks like you already know what the command is named (since you used it as a tag). Is it not available in VisualHg? I would guess it's available in the context menu (i.e. right click) for the file.
Right-click on the file you want to revert and select "Revert Changes", this will show the revert window where you can see the file diff and perform the reversion by clicking the "Revert" button in the botom right corner.
Most of the times, when you make a lot of modifications to a file, you may find out that some of them are useful ( I do, at least ). Of course, for reverting the whole contents of the file, you should use revert as others have suggested. If however, you think you may have something useful in your current modifications, that you'd like to keep, consider using the record extension. It's an extension that ships with Mercurial, and it will allow you to choose whether or not you want to include some (c)hunks in your next commit.
I understand that in mercurial you can never remove a history for a file unless you do something like this. Is there any way to disable history for certain files from ever being created?. If any other repository system is capable of doing that, please put that down as well.
Why would I want that? Well, in our build system, new binaries are constantly being committed which the non-programmers can use to run the program without compiling every time (the compilation is done by the build system). Each time new binaries are committed, the old ones are useless as far as we are concerned. It is unnecessarily taking up space. If the new binary messes up by any chance, we can always revert back to older source and rebuild (assuming there is a way to disable history for specific files).
As you found out, you cannot do what you want directly in Mercurial.
I suggest you put the binaries somewhere else -- a Subversion subrepo would be a good choice. That way you will only download the latest version of each file on the client, but you will have all versions on your server (where it should be easy to add more disk space).
This is not quite a specifc question, and more me like for a criticism of my current approach.
I would like to include the program version number in the program I am developing. This is not a commercial product, but a research application so it is important to know which version generated the results.
My method works as follows:
There is a "pre-commit" hook in my .hg/hgrc file link to version_gen.sh
version_gen.sh consists solely of:
hg parent --template "r{rev}_{date|shortdate}" > version.num
In the makefile, the line version="%__VERSION__% in the main script is replaced with the content of the version.num file.
Are there better ways of doing this? The only real short coming I can see is that if you only commit a specfic file, version.num will be updated, but it won't be commited, and if I tried to add always committing that file, that would result in an infite loop (unless I created some temp file to indicate I was already in a commit, but that seems ugly...).
The problem
As you've identified, you've really created a Catch-22 situation here.
You can't really put meaningful information in the version.num file until the changes are committed and because you are storing version.num in the repository, you can't commit changes to the repository until you have populated the version.num file.
My solution
What I would suggest is:
Get rid of the "pre-commit" hook and hg forget the version.num file.
Add version.num to your .hgignore file.
Adjust version_gen.sh to consist of:
hg parent --template "r{node|short}_{date|shortdate}" > version.num
In the makefile, make sure version_gen.sh is run before version.num is used to set the version parameter.
My reasons
As #Ry4an suggests, getting the build system to insert revision information into the software at build time, using information from the Version Control System is a much better option. The only problem with this is if you try to compile the code from an hg archive of the repository, where the build system cannot extract the relevant information.
I would be inclined to discourage this however - in my own build system, the build failed if revision information couldn't be extracted.
Also, as #Kai Inkinen suggests, using the revision number is not portable. Rev 21 on one machine might be rev 22 on another. While this may not be a problem right now, it could be in the future, if you start colaborating with other people.
Finally, I explain my reasons for not liking the Keyword extension in a question of mine, which touches on similar issues to your own question:
I looked at Mercurials Keyword extension, since it seemed like the obvious solution. However the more I looked at it and read peoples opinions, the more that I came to the conclusion that it wasn't the right thing to do.
I also remember the problems that keyword substitution has caused me in projects at previous companies. ...
Also, I don't particularly want to have to enable Mercurial extensions to get the build to complete. I want the solution to be self contained, so that it isn't easy for the application to be accidentally compiled without the embedded version information just because an extension isn't enabled or the right helper software hasn't been installed.
Then in comments to an answer which suggested using the keyword extension anyway:
... I rejected using the keyword extension as it would be too easy to end up with the string "$Id$" being compiled into the executable. If keyword expansion was built into mercurial rather than an extension, and on by default, I might consider it, but as it stands it just wouldn't be reliable. – Mark Booth
A don't think that there can be a more reliable solution. What if someone accidentally damages .hg or builds not from a clone but from an archive? – Mr.Cat
#Mr.Cat - I don't think there can be a less reliable solution than the keywords extension. Anywhere you haven't explicitly enabled the extension (or someone has disabled it) then you get the literal string "$ID$" compiled into the object file without complaint. If mercurial or the repo is damaged (not sure which you meant) you need to fix that first anyway. As for hg archive, my original solution fails to compile if you try to build it from an archive! That is precisely what I want. I don't want any source to be compiled into our apps without it source being under revision control! – Mark Booth
What you are trying to do is called Keyword Expansion, which is not supported in Mercurial core.
You can integrate that expansion in make file, or (simpler) with the Keyword extension.
This extension allows the expansion of RCS/CVS-like and user defined keys in text files tracked by Mercurial.
Expansion takes place in the working directory or/and when creating a distribution using "hg archive"
That you use a pre-commit hook is what's concerning. You shouldn't be putting the rest of version_gen.sh into the source files thesemves, just into the build/release artifacts which you can do more accurately with an 'update' hook.
You don't want the Makefile to actually change in the repo with each commit, that just makes merges hell. You want to insert the version after checking out the files in advance of a build, which is is what an update hook does.
In distributed systems like Mercurial, the actual "version number" does not necessarily mean the same thing in every environment. Even if this is a single person project, and you are really careful with having only your central repo, you would still probably want to use the sha1-sum instead, since that is truly unique for the given repository state. The sha1 can be fetched through the template {node}
As a suggestion, I think that a better workflow would be to use tags instead, which btw are also local to your repository until you push them upstream. Don't write your number into a file, but instead tag your release code with a meaningful tag like
RELEASE_2
or
RELEASE_2010-04-01
or maybe script this and use the template to create the tag?
You can then add the tag to your non-versioned (in .hgignore) version.num file to be added into the build. This way you can give meaningful names to the releases and you tie the release to the unique identifier.