cleaning out a Mercurial Repository - version-control

There are a bunch of file in the history of my hg repo that have been removed. They are causing the repo to get pretty big (several of them are images, and sql dumps from early in the project, among other things that never should have been comitted in the first place).
How do I get mercurial to forget about that stuff and get my repository down to a reasonable size again?
Should I just make a copy of the files (and the .hgignore) and make a new repo, while archiving the old one for future reference?

See:
$ hg convert --help
...
$ hg convert --filemap fmap old new
where file fmap contains something like:
exclude path/to/file/to/purge
(src: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial/2008-August/020721.html)

Related

Mercurial: "no match found" when performing merge, "no node!" if I try to strip

I have a mercurial dropbox hosted in a Dropbox folder on which I push from another repo that I keep in my office PC. In this way I can work on my project from the office and perform hotfixes from home.
Something bad happened while synchronizing, therefore a file wasn't correctly put in sync somewhere. I have a revision (n. 678) which I can't merge with actual head.
If I try to merge I get this message
abort:
data/hotelsclick/src/main/res/values/string-array.xml.i#5f2b6faa86a1:
no match found!
if I try to delete that useless revision with hg strip 678 I get
abort:
data/hotelsclick/src/main/res/values/string-array.xml.i#5f2b6faa86a1:
no node!
and if I perform a hg verify this is the result
checking files [...]/src/main/res/values/string-array.xml#678: 5f2b6faa86a1 in manifests not found
libs/date-interval-picker/.git/index#678: a83e1b77d446 in manifests
not found 8009 files, 681 changesets, 14161 total revisions 2
integrity errors encountered! (first damaged changeset appears to be
678)
what if I try to push?
searching for changes
abort: push creates new remote head 16c4912af9a5!
(merge or see "hg help push" for details about pushing new heads)
So I cannot merge, cannot delete that revision, cannot push. I'm pretty stuck and I don't know why. Can anybody please help? I don't care about the content of revision 678, if I could I'd delete it happily.
First of all, I strongly recommend against using a file synchronization service (whether Dropbox or Google Drive or something else) for use with version control systems. These services do not respect the atomicity of repository operations; even version control systems with single file repositories (such as Fossil) are not 100% safe and even if only a single user is using the service.
Second, you have a partially corrupted repository that you need to repair. In the ideal case, you have a clean backup somewhere, even if it's not perfectly up-to-date and can replay the missing revisions selectively (e.g. with hg export and hg import).
Barring that, the next step would be to see if you can do a partial clone. For example, you can try:
hg clone -r 680 /path/to/repo /path/to/clean_repo
This should normally skip revision 678, if only that data is defective. However, the way that delta compression works, revisions that occur in order after 678 may also have been corrupted. In this case, I would try it with -r 677 instead of -r 680 and see if hg export works for copying revisions 679 and 680.
If that does not work and the corruption goes deeper, I would then try the convert extension:
hg --config extensions.convert= convert --config convert.hg.ignoreerrors=True /path/to/repo /path/to/clean_repo
Note that such a conversion will likely change the hash values of individual repository entries and means that you will have to update the repository contents everywhere.

How to freeze a file for changes but leave it in the repository using Mercurial

Quite often I have a situation like the following:
some Hg repository with a bunch of configuration files that are shared
some configuration files contain passwords, that should not be shared, they are local to the user
I would like to keep a version history on these files, but they will only occasionally be updated. It is annoying if every time you do a commit or merge or update you have to remember that you do not want to commit your locally changed password.
How can I freeze a file in the repository (and conversely, for the occasional legitimate update, unfreeze it) so that it does not appear in the commit list, but does appear as versioned in the repository and everyone can share a base copy?
This question gets asked a lot, and the answer is always the same: there's no good way to do what you want. A file that's tracked is tracked for all changes.
The setup everyone settles on is committing a configurationfile.example to the repo where changes everyone needs are shared, and add configurationfile to your ignore. If you're savvy you then have your launch script copy configurationfile.example to configuration location if it doesn't already exists. If your configuration format is flexible enough to support an include (most are these days) you have you configurationfile committed and have it do an include of a non-tracked (ignored) configurationfile.local where people override things. This is how everyone does it in both git and Mercurial.
-X option for commit, none (easy) for merge
-X --exclude PATTERN [+] exclude names matching the given patterns
i.e most times you commit hg ci -X FILENAME, sometimes - pure hg ci. You can define hg ci -X FILENAME as new alias and use two different commands for different commits
In case of merges you can try to define for config-file special merge-tool (provably internal:local or internal:fail)
Anyway, you selected wrong and error-prone method of storing local configs as shared common files. (Viable) alternatives may include (in order to name a few)
Config.TEMPLATE in repository and modified for local needs hgignore'd Config
LocalBranch, in which you store code with location-specific changes
MQ extension (somehow related to 1-st solution) - repository stored "vanilla" config, all local-only changes placed in MQ-patch

VCS: push only source code directory

I work on Java project. How I can push only source directory without temporary files, build files and project files? I use Mercurial.
Mercurial will only push history, which means that it is only things that you have asked it to track (with hg add) and later committed (with hg commit) that will be pushed.
So like Jim says, you should setup .hgignore file. Do this before adding files to your project and double-check that hg status only lists files you want to add. Then run hg add to add them all.
If you've already put the temporary files and build artifacts under version control, then you can either use hg forget to stop tracking them. You'll still carry them around in the history, so if we've talking about tens of megabytes, then you probably want to re-create the repository.
Create an .hgignore file.

Mercurial workflow for updating with uncommitted changes?

So i've made the switch from CVS to mercurial for my website.
The biggest issue I am having is that if i'm working on some files that I don't want to commit, I just save them.. I then have other files I want to push to the server, however if someone else has made changes to the repository, and I pull them down.. It asks me to merge or rebase.. either of these options will cause me to lose my local changes that I have not committed.
I've read that I should clone the repository for each project on my local host and merge it into the live when it's ready to do so. This not only seems tedious, but also takes a long time as it's a large repository.
Are there better solutions to this?
I would have hoped that Mercurial would see that I haven't committed my changes (even though I have changed the file from what's on the server) so it'd just overlook the file.
Any input on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Also, i'm using the hg eclipse plugin to work on my files and push/pull from the server.
hg shelve is your friend here I think.
which comes from the shelve extention (maybe - see below)
from the overview:
The shelve extension provides the
shelve command to lets you choose
which parts of the changes in a
working directory you'd like to set
aside temporarily, at the granularity
of patch hunks. You can later restore
the shelved patch hunks using the
unshelve command.
The shelve extension has been adapted
from Mercurial's RecordExtension.
or maybe its the attic extension
This module deals with a set of
patches in the folder .hg/attic. At
any time you can shelve your current
working copy changes there or unshelve
a patch from the folder.
it seems to have the same syntax as the shelve extension, so I'm not certain which one I've used
I second #Sam's answer. However, if you prefer to use standard Mercurial, a simple workflow is to
save your working dir changes in a temporary file,
sync your working dir with a specific revision, then
push, pull, merge .. whatever you want to do and which requires a clean working copy, and
get back your changes from the temporary file into the working dir.
For instance:
$ hg diff > snapshot.patch # save your uncommited changes
$ hg up -C # get a clean working copy
$ hg pull # do things ..
$ hg merge # .. you need a clean ..
$ hg commit -m "merge" # .. working copy for
$ hg import snapshot.patch # get back your uncommited work
First, are you working from the commandline, or using something like Tortoise?
If you're working from the commandline, and you've done a pull, mercurial will not ask you to do anything, as it merely updates your local repository.
If you then do an hg update and have local changes, it should do what you're used to from CVS. It will update to the tip of the current branch, and attempt to merge your outstanding changes in. There are some caveats to that, so refer to the official docs at http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hg.1.html#update.
Also, for temporarily storing changes, I would recommend MQ over shelve. Shelve only provides one storage area, whereas MQ provides as many as you need. MQ takes some getting used to, but worth the investment.

Mercurial: Getting changed files from revision?

I can't get my head around how I can get only the files that were changed in my last revision, and not the complete repo, which i get by using Clone. This would be super helpful to for instance, deploy the last changed files.
What do I do?
Thanks
You cannot transfer just some files -- you must always have a full clone locally. So I suggest you make that once and then pull in changes incrementally.
You should then use hg status to show the names of files changes been revisions. You normally use hg status to see which files are changes compared to the working copy parent revision, but you can pass --rev to status to see changes between any two revisions!
So use
$ hg status --change tip
to see which files were changed in the tip changeset. Use
$ hg pull
$ hg status --rev .:tip
to see what files will be changed when you do a hg update after a pull. The update will take you from the current working directory parent, denoted by ., to the tip, assuming you are on the same named branch as tip. Otherwise hg update will take you to the tip-most changeset on your current branch.
You can use a template to hg log or hg tip to get all filenames:
hg tip --template '{files}'
or to get e.g. all files changed/added/modified by changeset 5:
hg log -r5 --template '{files}'
You can read more about templates Mercurial: The Definitive Guide, Chapter 11. Customizing the output of Mercurial or short help with hg help templating`
If you want to do something to the files e.g grep through them:
hg tip --template '{files}' | xargs grep foo
Careful this will break with filenames containing spaces!
To process all kinds of filenames something more complicated is needed (thanks to mg on #mercurial for the tip):
We need multiline styles for this suppose a file named zerosep contains:
changeset = "{files}"
file = "{file}\0"
Then you can use this to produce a \0 separated list of filenames and process it with xargs -0:
hg tip --style zerosep | xargs -0 grep foo
Information how this works can be found in: Listing files on multiple lines
Martin has the right way to get a list of what files have changed in a revision, and I've upvoted his answer, but just to expand on why your question is a little off:
In Mercurial every location has a full copy with all changes. If you're going to use Mercurial to deploy to your server then you have to clone everything to your server -- once. After that push/pull will move over only the (compressed) changesets that the server doesn't already have.
If you don't want to have everything that ever was on the server, then you need to use something other than mercurial for your deployment, perhaps something fed from the status commands Martin showed or a snapshot created from hg archive.
Personally, I'm okay with having full history on my servers, and just do a hg pull ; hg update on the server for each new deployment. It's tidy and efficient.