Re: help with mercurial

[John W. Eaton]

On 20-Jan-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

| On 20 January 2011 05:05, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
| > In the past we created separate Mercurial archives for the release
| > branches.  That had some advantages, like a very low probability of
| > accidental merges or commits on the wrong branch, no cluttering of the
| > main archive with a branch that few people would be working with.  But
| > it also had the big disadvantage of being mostly hidden from view.  So
| > I'm thinking of making the release-3-4-x branch a named branch on the
| > savannah archive.  I think I know how to do that.  But I'd also like
| > to put the older release-3-0-x and release-3-2-x branches there too,
| > both as named branches.  Does anyone here know what is needed to do
| > that?
| 
| Isn't this what you would like to do?
| 
|       https://bitbucket.org/brodie/named-branches-example/wiki/Home
| 
| I've pointed at this example before, so maybe not.
| 
| You're not expecting git-like branches, are you?

I'm not sure what a "git-like branch" is.

| Mercurial branches
| are a bit more permanent than git-branches. What makes sense to me is
| that example, two separate branches, and to use tags to mark releases,
| not a whole separate branch per stable release, especially seeing how
| we don't backport bug fixes to several stable releases, only to the
| last one.

I probably just don't get version control, but to me that doesn't seem
to model what is actually going on, which is that when we make a
release, there is actually a fork in the development.  At the end of a
release series, that branch is essentially abandoned.  It doesn't make
sense to me to continue with it once the release series is obsolete.

What I want to do with the release-3-0-x and release-3-2-x branches
that we currently have in separate archives is to put them in as named
branches in the archive on savannah.  I think I found a way to do
that.  In what follows, I use revision numbers, only because I think
it is clearer; I understand that those numbers are not the same in all
copies of an archive.

I have the main archive "octave" and one of the old release archives
"release-3-0-x" in directories side by side.  In the main archive,
find the changeset that created the 3-0-0 release, and update to it:

  cd octave
  hg log
  hg update -r 7335

Create a named branch at this point:

  hg branch release-3-0-x

In the release archive, find the most recent changeset and the first
changeset made after the release:

  cd ../release-3-0-x
  hg tip
  hg log

Transplant all patches from the release-3-0-x archive from the point
of the release to the most recent into the main archive:

  cd ../octave
  i=7336
  while [[ $i < 7692 ]]; do
    hg transplant -s ../octave-release-3-0-x $((i++))
  done

Then this can be pushed to another archive with

  hg push --new-branch another-archive

jwe