I'm using ant, hg, and the linux Flash as3 libraries to compile. I would like to include some sort of version info automatically, for debugging purposes.
No matter what you're using for version control, remember that the key thing here is that you need the commit id before compiling the swf, that's what makes it tricky.
Using HG hooks (or whatever the equivalent from SVN is called in HG) you have to first commit your code, get the commit id, then write that info to one of the .as files and finally call Ant to compile the SWF.
The problem would be if you want to keep that SWF under version control too. Because even if your Ant task could somehow inject the info directly into the SWF, it would appear as modified (it has been updated after the commit).
In JS / HTML / PHP / whatever this is so much simpler because there's no compiling.
I still need to fully figure this one out, I've only partially done it in the past, so I'm all ears for a complete solution.
I am not familiar with ant, but the simplest and most reliable process is to dynamically create a file and put the result of hg id or hg parents somewhere in it.
For example mercurial does this in setup.py, maybe it will help you do a similar thing. version is taken from the result of calling hg id -i -t.
f = open("mercurial/__version__.py", "w")
f.write('# this file is autogenerated by setup.py\n')
f.write('version = "%s"\n' % version)
f.close()
Related
We recently moved from Perforce to Mercurial and love it!
One little problem: after much research we can't figure out how to map a special directory in the repository to some special place on the client. Here is an example of our hg repo:
/foo/source files
/bar/source files
/build
/macosx/mac make files
/win/windows make files
With Perforce, we were using client spec mappings to map //depot/build/macosx/... to just /build/... on the Mac client, and //depot/build/win/... to /build/... on the Windows dev box. Directories foo and bar are synced as is. Makefiles in /foo and /bar assume that our build makefiles are located in /build and we would like to keep them as is. The final client set of files should look like this:
/foo/source files
/bar/source files
/build/client specific make files
I've read about subrepos, but this solution does not seem to be client specific.
Any idea how to solve this problem will be very much appreciated!
You can't check out only portions of a repository with Mercurial.
You always get a clone containing everything, and the working directory will also contain everything.
With Mercurial you should strive to have 1 repository for 1 project, so that everything you get logically belongs together, and then you shouldn't have much need for just a portion of it.
This also means that whatever directory structure you have in your Mercurial repository will always match exactly the structure you have on disk.
You can't do this with Mercurial as it doesn't have the concept of a client separate from a depot.
However, you can use a symlink on Mac OS X (ln -s) and a junction on windows (mklink on Vista and up using the junction tool on XP http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx) to solve this problem on the file system level.
Alternatively you can use a variable in the Makefiles to refer to the build directory (eg $(BUILD)/something.ext instead of build/something.ext).
This sort of mapping cannot be done in Mercurial. There is an outstanding TODO item for 'narrow' clones so you can check out just a subdirectory. And I could see an implementation of that supporting that sort of functionality. But then again, I know that something like this would be considered a little too 'clever' (read complex) and there would be a lot of push-back on the idea.
In the meantime, I would suggest one of these two solutions.
Symbolic links. Put the symbolic link to your build directory in your .hgignore file. Then each person can make their own symbolic link to the appropriate directory of build files. This has the disadvantage of not working on a platform without symbolic links.
An environment variable that's used in a top level makefile to construct the path to the platform specific makefile it should be calling.
I want to use Mercurial to capture changes made to the vanilla installation of a piece of software we use. Everytime we upgrade the software, we need to manually edit the various configuration files and add 3rd party libraries that we use in the current version of the software. Creating patches for the configuration files changes are fine, but how do I add 3rd party libraries (binaries) to a Mercurial patch? Is it even possible?
If you were to try to get the patch for the 7th revision...
hg export --git -r 7 -o 7.patch
Yes, the mq extension can handle binary data just as well as textual data. It will use Git's extended patch format to save the binary data. This is transparently handled for you when you refresh a patch with modified binary files.
Whether or not this is a good idea is another question — VonC is correct when he writes that this is not the normal use case for a version control system.
Even if it may be possible, it is not advisable! (for Mercurial or any other VCS)
A Version Control System is not made to record binaries (mainly because it quickly grows out of proportion, take a all lot of disk space, and has no efficient way to be stored in delta)
You should record the configuration need for each version you tag.
That can be a text file, or a maven pom for instance. Anything that allow an external mechanism (like maven) to download and locally store for you the right dependencies.
That means your patch will include changes to that text file (pom for instance), as well as the rest of the code modifications.
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.
We are just beginning to learn and evaluate Mercurial, due to an increasing number of nightmare merges, and various other problems we've had with SVN lately.
A client wants us to pull down a live copy of their site, do some SEO work on it, and push it back to them. They have no source control at all. I figure this is a great project to work on with Mercurial. Instead of putting it into our SVN and exporting when we are done, we'll use Mercurial... But right away it seems I have some problem :)
They have a file called ---.config which seems to cause our Mercurial to barf. It just can't commit that file. I've created the repo and committed everything else, but I just can't get this one file committed.
We are running on Windows 2008 x64 with TortoiseHG 1.0.
I suppose I could ignore the file since it is unlikely we'll need to work with it, but still - I'd like to learn how to use Mercurial a bit better. Is there a way around this?
EDIT: here is the error message:
('commit', GetoptError('option ---.config not recognized', '-.config'))
This happens when I hit the "commit" button in TortoiseHG with that file selected.
Not sure about hg, but most command line tools treat anything after a -- as a non-option. This is helpful if you have a filename that starts with -- or a wildcard that picks up such a file; try prefixing your filename or wildcard with --, e.g., hg command -- *.config.
The problem is that TortoiseHg did not escape filenames correctly when calling hg. When a filename starts with --, one must take extra care when using it on command lines.
I have just sent a patch which will hopefully make it into TortoiseHg 1.0.1, which is scheduled to be released later today.
So I'm pretty new to version control but I'm trying to use Mercurial on my Mac to keep a large Python data analysis program organized. I typically clone my main repository, tweak the clone's code a bit, and run the code on my data. If the changes were successful I commit and eventually push the changes back to my main repository. I guess that's a pretty typical workflow under version control.
My problem is that my code is run on the command-line, with several command-line arguments that refer to data files in the current working directory (and I have many such directories I need to test the code in, and they're outside of version control). So before using Mercurial I just kept my code in one ~/bin directory which was part of my PATH environment variable. Now, with version control, I need to either (1) after each edit, copy my current clone's executables to the ~/bin directory before running the code on the command line, or (2) each time I clone my code, add my current clone's path to the PATH, or (3) specify the entire/path/to/my/programs on the command line each time I run the code. None of these are very convenient, and I'm left feeling like there must be an elegant solution that I just don't know. Maybe something involving Mercurial's hooks? I want my under-revision code to be runnable on the command line between commits, so this seemed to rule out hooks, but I don't know... Many thanks for any suggestions!
Ry4an's answer is good if you want to continue with the multiple-clones workflow. But it's also worth being aware that Mercurial's powerful enough to allow you most of the benefits of that workflow without ever leaving your single "main" repo. I.e. you can create branches (named or anonymous) for experimental features, easily "hg update" to whatever version of the code you want to test, even use the mq extension to prune branches that didn't work out.
What I do in such a case is set up a two deep chain of symlinks to my binary in my current clone. For example I'll have:
/usr/bin/myappname
which is a symlink to
/home/me/repos/CURRENT/bin/myappname
where /home/me/repos/CURRENT is a symlink to whatever my current working clone is, for example:
/home/me/repos/myproject-expirment
After setting up the initial /usr/bin/myappname symlink all I have to do is update the CURRENT symlink when I create a new clone on which I'm working.