Is there a way with Mercurial to do a dummy push?
I basically want to see what would happen in the event that I did a push with my current changesets.
I remember this type of functionality being available in Subversion but I'm not sure how I'd go about it with Mercurial.
The reason for this is that I'd like to see how many changes are being pushed to how many files etc etc, all of the info that's shown during a real push.
Perhaps there's a better way of doing this that I don't know about yet?
You want hg outgoing.
Related
Say I do my new feature development either in default, or an entirely new branch made just for the feature for a web site project. When it comes time to push the feature out to the live website, I want to move it to the live branch, which I then hg archive to my apache directory.
Throughout everything, I want to be absolutely sure not to push other, unrelated changes that are not yet ready to be published to the live branch.
Is this even a good idea? Or should I be doing something entirely different?
If the code is in default, how do I push only the one thing I need and not everything to live? If I push just the latest changeset, is it smart enough to send the latest version of those files, or will it only do the changesets?
If the code is in an entirely new branch, do I merge the whole branch into live? How do I get those changes back to my default branch so I see them there too?
I was reading the "Task Based Management" section of the Mercurial Kick Start guide and it mentions merging default into your branch. I found this very confusing and was wondering why you'd ever do this.
Thanks for any help you guys can provide.
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I'm using TortoiseHG BTW
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HG now has Phases. Change a phase of a changeset to secret and it will not be pushed when you use push. You can do it using TortoiseHG GUI.
In addition to that, be aware that just pushing or pulling something does not automatically change any files in the working directory. It only makes some additional changesets available. Only by using update do you actually change any files in your working dir. (unless you configure hg to update automatically).
In the example you linked, there is a bug fix in the default branch. Bob wants to have this fix in his branch too, so he merges default branch with his branch. This is just an example to see how branching works. You do not have to use it in exactly the same way. If you just begin your Mercurial adventure, then you should better use just one branch until you have a good reason to use more.
For example: 3 developers work on the same project and all of them use just one branch (default). 1 of the developers wants to do a major refactoring of the code. He wants to commit several very unstable changesets (many "in the middle of work"). Doing so in the default branch might upset other developers. That is a good reason to create a branch. After his version is stable enough he will merge his branch into default. While he is doing development in his branch, he wants to be up-to-date with other developers, so he frequently merges default into his branch. Staying in a separate branch for too long might result in difficult merges. Luckily merging is very quick in HG, so merge often.
I have accidentally pushed a branch to a repo. Is there anyway I could alter the repo ( and remove the branch )? Closing it is not a solution.
You got a couple of options, none of them easy, and none of them will leave you with a "phew, saved by the bell" feeling afterwards.
The only real way to fix this problem is to try to avoid it in the first place.
Having said that, let's explore the options here:
Eradicate the changesets
Introduce further changesets that "undo" the changes
The first option, to eradicate the changesets, is hard. Since you pushed the changesets to your central repository, you need direct access to the repositories on that server.
If this is a server where you don't have direct access to the repositories, only through a web interface, or through push/pull/clone, then your option is to hope that the web interface have methods for eradicating those changesets, otherwise go to option 2.
In order to get rid of the changesets, you can either make a new clone of the repository with the changesets, and specify options that stop just shy of introducing the changesets you want to get rid of, or you can use the MQ extension and strip the offending changesets out.
Either is good, but personally I like the clone option.
However, this option hinges on the fact that any and all developers that are using the central repository either:
Have not already pulled the offending changesets from the central repository.
Or are prepared to get rid of said changesets locally as well.
For instance, you could instruct all your developers to kill their local clones, and reclone a fresh copy after you have stripped away the changesets in the central repository.
Here's the important part:
If you cannot get all developers to help with this, you should drop this line of thought and go to option 2 instead
Why? Because now you have two problems:
You need to introduce barriers that ensure no developers can push the same changesets onto the server again, after you got rid of them. Note that relying on the warning by the server to prevent new branches being pushed is perhaps not good enough, as developers might have branches of their own they want to push, and thus not notice that they'll be pushing yours as well.
Any work any developer has done based on any of the offending changesets must either be rebased to a new place, or eradicated as well.
In short, this will give you lots of extra work. I would not do this unless the offending changesets were super-critial to get rid of.
Option 2, on the other hand, comes with its own problems, but is a bit easier to carry out.
Basically you use the hg backout command to introduce a new changeset that reverses the modifications done by the offending changesets, and commit and push that.
The problem here is that if at some point you really want to introduce those changesets, you will have to fight a bit with Mercurial in order to get the merges right.
However, there will be no more work for your fellow developers. The next time they pull, they'll get your correction changeset as well.
Let me just restate this option in different words:
Instead of getting rid of the changesets, keep them, but introduce another changeset that reverses the changes.
Neither option is good, both will generate some extra work.
We've ran into a similar problem once, when we had to remove a branch from the server repo from which all devs regularly pull. Backout wasn't an option because the problematic branch had already been pulled by everyone.
We stripped (hg strip from the MQ extension) the branch in the server repo. From now on, if a developer tried to push, he had a message “push creates new remote branches”, even though they didn't actually created any. We created a batch file with the strip command, distributed it among the devs and explained the “new remote branches” is a signal to run the batch file.
This approach takes some time and effort before everybody gets rid of the branch, but it works.
If the 'backout' option described in Jason's comment above doesn't do it for you, you can remake the repo up until the point of your mistaken push using hg convert, which (despite its name) also works with hg.
eg hg convert -r before-mistaken-push /path/to/original /path/to/new
You might have to play with the usebranchnames and clonebranches settings.
Like the title says. I essentially want a way to make Mercurial "forget" a changeset in the local repository. Obviously, this would only work for changesets which had not been pushed without also reverting the original changeset.
Mercurial doesn't make forgetting anything easy -- no commands that are destructive of history are enabled by default. Without enabling any extensions the easiest way to do this would be:
hg clone -U -r LAST_CHANGE_YOU_WANT your-repo new-repo
and then replace the .hg in your-repo with the one from new-repo.
In this case specifically, I was trying to move changes between branches when the normal merge wouldn't work, so I used MQ, however I wanted the changes to remain in the working copy rather than accidentally getting pushed. It looks like one can do what I wanted with hg import --no-commit, which TortoiseHg does not currently (but should soon) provide any UI for.
I'm developing a project, and I am making small, exploratory changes. After each change, I'd like to diff against the previous version I had. However, I don't want to commit each of these small changes to the permanent history until I'm satisfied that the final change should be made permanent. Then I'd like to commit it in one go.
What's the feature in Mercurial that lets me do this?
I think you're looking for mercurial queues... it allows you to maintain a set of patches against source without committing them. You can push and pop patches until you get things right, then commit as appropriate.
Nice blog post here http://www.canonware.com/~ttt/2008/04/using-mercurial-patch-queues-for-daily.html
Or official documentation here http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/advanced-uses-of-mercurial-queues.html
You can use MQ as Sam mentioned, or you could just commit as usual and then use the Collapse extension or the HistEdit extension to fold the "intermediate" changesets together. You would just need to make sure you don't push them anywhere in the mean time.
I have a local mercurial repository with some site-specific changes in it. What I would like to do is set a couple files to be un-commitable so that they aren't automatically committed when I do an hg commit with no arguments.
Right now, I'm doing complicated things with mq and guards to achieve this, pushing and popping and selecting guards to prevent my changes (which are checked into an mq patch) from getting committed.
Is there an easier way to do this? I'm sick of reading the help for all the mq commands every time I want to commit a change that doesn't include my site-specific changes.
I would put those files in .hgignore and commit a "sample" form of those files so that they could be easily recreated for a new site when someone checks out your code.
I know that bazaar has shelve and unshelve commands to push and pop changes you don't want included in a commit. I think it's pretty likely that Mercurial has similar commands.
I'm curious why you can't have another repo checked out with those specific changes, and then transplant/pull/patch to it when you need to update stuff. Then you'd be primarily working from the original repo, and it's not like you'd be wasting space since hg uses links. I commonly have two+ versions checked out so I can work on a number of updates then merge them together.