Mercurial: closing named branches

[kareila]

I will shortly be pushing changesets that close the staging and production branches in the dw-free repository. The branch system hasn't been used effectively and causes problems whenever cloning a new copy of the repository, so I'm reverting to using the default branch for all development.

There shouldn't be any user facing changes from this, except for one change to bootstrap.pl. However, if you run into any difficulties please let me know immediately. Thanks!

ETA: my testing shows that you may have to manually do hg update -C tip after pulling in the dw-free changes, since the active branch has been switched. After that everything should work normally, although the branches will not appear to be closed until you update Mercurial to a version that supports branch closings.

Comments

[pauamma]

Was that an attempt to o something along the lines of http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/45819.html?thread=403451#cmt403451 ? If so, does that mean we're dropping tbe idea, or just the implementation?

[kareila]

If we ever decide to support multiple repositories with varying levels of commit access, we can revisit the branch idea for pulling in those changes to the main repository. But that's really unrelated to the current branches.

[vlion]

Interesting. So mq is the One True way now?

/hates mq.

//doesn't do dw dev, so his opinion doesn't count

[afuna]

We use mercurial for the DW repositories. Some of the developers use MQ, but not everyone by any means. (Also, this entry has nothing to do with MQ that I can see)

[vlion]

Well, branching is used to keep one's commits off the mainline, which is sometimes what mq is used for - so if branches are not used, then mq must be?

[afuna]

Oh! Well since we need to get things reviewed before commit, usually changes end up being split off into a patch and uploaded to zilla, instead of having patches committed directly, and pushed to the central repository.

[vlion]

*durpy stare*

Ooooh. Interesting.....

huh.

Okay.

[kareila]

Yes, what she said.

Also, the real alternative to named branches in Mercurial is cloning multiple copies of a repository, and pushing and pulling changes between them.

[kareila]

Whoops, my network connection burped. Sorry for the doubled comment!

[sophie]

On the Dreamhack machine, everything seems to be fine; there's apparently no need to do any special commands after updating. It's currently using Mercurial 0.9.5 (as the box itself is still on Hardy Heron). tip shows up correctly even without an explicit "hg update -C tip".

[kareila]

Yep, the cloning is clean now (which is why I made the change). It's just existing repositories that have to force the update to tip.

I was curious if it would be possible to update Mercurial without upgrading the whole system, but if not, it's no big deal.

[sophie]

Actually, I meant that existing repos are fine too - just update and there's no problem:

dh-testuser@hack:~/dw/cvs/dw-free$ hg heads
changeset:   2582:3d6b9b44d272
branch:      production
tag:         tip
user:        fu
date:        Tue Jul 06 02:34:20 2010 +0800
summary:     http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2289

dh-testuser@hack:~/dw/cvs/dw-free$ ~/dw/bin/cvsreport.pl -u
Updating CVS dir 'dw-free' ...
pulling from http://hg.dwscoalition.org/dw-free
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 62 changesets with 273 changes to 209 files (+2 heads)
(run 'hg heads' to see heads, 'hg merge' to merge)
86 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

[... snip rest of update ...]

dh-testuser@hack:~/dw/cvs/dw-free$ hg heads
changeset:   2644:9786201db0cb
tag:         tip
user:        kareila
date:        Fri Jul 23 09:35:07 2010 -0500
summary:     http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2837

changeset:   2620:2fa8c5fd7953
branch:      production
parent:      2617:9f696cf19910
user:        kareila
date:        Mon Jul 19 12:13:29 2010 -0500
summary:     closing production branch

changeset:   2618:80bf5c8a0bfc
branch:      staging
parent:      85:74330150fd51
user:        kareila
date:        Mon Jul 19 12:10:55 2010 -0500
summary:     closing staging branch

And indeed, that's the latest change right now. I don't think there are any problems associated with having 3 heads, so nobody actually needs to force an update.

As for upgrading Mercurial, I could compile from source; that should work. But then the Dreamhack box wouldn't be the ideal 'supported installation', I suspect.

[sophie]

I do believe I confused the hg heads and hg parents commands. I apologise, and humbly eat my words.

(for those who aren't aware; hg heads shows the latest revisions for each open branch in the repository, while hg parents shows the revision that the working copy is based on. I thought that the former did what the latter does. Ooooops.)

Sorry 'bout that!