Mercurial/Tips And Tricks

Mercurial
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This is the page to add your favorite Mercurial tip.

Tips and Tricks

Preparing a local repo for a cws

• If you want to create a local repo for an existing cws, take care to clone to the milestone of the cws.

hg clone -r <CWS_milestone> <local_prestine copy> <local_cws_repo>

After pulling/merging

• hg log --follow-first is a convenient way to display your CWS changes at the top of the log.
• hg log --follow-first -P <original_clone_milestone> will show only the CWS changesets.
• hg outgoing works as well, of course.

Combined diff which contains exactly the changes of your CWS without anything pulled from master

• If your current milestone tag is locally available: hg diff -r <current_milestone_tag>
• If your current milestone tag is *not* locally available (might happen, see above):
  • search for your last pull/merge from the master with hg log -m
  • hg diff -r <second_parent_of_last_master_merge>
  • Alternatively, if you just did a pull/merge from master: hg export --switch-parent tip

Styles

The default output format of some commands does not suit you? Use styles:

• hg log --style=compact
• hg outgoing --style=changelog"
• Or create your own format with the template engine:
  • hg outgoing --template '{date|shortdate} {author|person} {desc}\n' --newest-first

On Windows/cygwin

TortoiseHg

Depending on the cygwin version, using cygwins hg (and other tools) sometimes fails. TortoiseHg (http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/stable/wiki/Home) can be used as alternative.

To get rid of cygwin's hg rename /usr/bin/hg.

You can decide which ssl support you use in the cygwin shell. If you want to use the ssh-agent then you have to specify the following line in the [ui] section of ~/.hgrc:

ssh = <Windows path to cygwin>\bin\ssh.exe -C

For the graphical interface of TortoiseHg Putty's pageant is the default ssh key provider. TortoiseHg allows easy graphical access to hg repositories within the Windows Explorer.

Accessing repository over ssh

• If you want to use the ssh client of your Cygwin shell (and also ssh-agent), add the following to the [ui] section of your mercurial.ini:

ssh = ssh -C

Handling multiple heads

Getting rid of multiple heads

When you accidentally created a repo with multiple heads, these are the possibilities to get rid of them:

Merge heads

• hg merge This is the easiest possibility.

Strip an unwanted branch

• hg strip can be used to get rid of the unwanted branch. It is provided by the Mq Extension.

Be very careful when using it as it deletes history from your repository!

Updating with mutiple heads

Updating your working copy is a bit more complex when there are mutiple heads in the repo. Quoth hg up --help:

   Update the repository's working directory to the specified
   revision, or the tip of the current branch if none is specified.
   Use null as the revision to remove the working copy (like 'hg
   clone -U').

So, if you clone a repo up to DEV300_m62 creating a working copy of its tip, and then pull a DEV300_m60-based cws and do a hg up you will not be on the tip of the cws, because Mercurial will not switch branches. If you want that, you would need a hg up -C -r tip.

Be careful, as this destroys any uncommited changes on the working copy. See hg up --help for details.

Containing multiple heads locally

If you (for whatever reason) have multiple heads in a local repo, pushing to outgoing will fail because it would create new heads. {{Documentation/Caution|Dont even think about creating multiple heads on