Ny way to delete local commits in Mercurial

mercurial

So I keep making a silly mistake in Mercurial. Often times, I'll start work without doing an "hg pull" and an "hg update." When I try to push my changes, I get an error.

Is there any way to delete my local commits so I can avoid creating multiple heads, branches, etc? I just want to delete my local commits, merge my changes with the tip, and then re-commit. Sounds simple, right? I can't seem to find any way to easily delete local commits so I can cleanly merge with the tip.

Again, I'm only trying to delete local commits made with "hg ci". I don't want to modify files, revert, etc.

Best Answer

Enable the "strip" extension and type the following:

hg strip #changeset# --keep

Where #changeset# is the hash for the changeset you want to remove. This will remove the said changeset including changesets that descend from it and will leave your working directory untouched. If you wish to also revert your committed code changes remove the --keep option.

For more information, check the Strip Extension.

If you get "unkown command 'strip'" you may need to enable it. To do so find the .hgrc or Mercurial.ini file and add the following to it:

[extensions]
strip =

Note that (as Juozas mentioned in his comment) having multiple heads is normal workflow in Mercurial. You should not use the strip command to battle that. Instead, you should merge your head with the incoming head, resolve any conflicts, test, and then push.

The strip command is useful when you really want to get rid of changesets that pollute the branch. In fact, if you're in this question's situation and you want to completely remove all "draft" change sets permanently, check out the top answer, which basically suggests doing:

hg strip 'roots(outgoing())'

Related Solutions

What’s the easiest way to commit and push a single file while leaving other modifications alone

It's been almost 2 years since I originally posed this question. I'd do it differently now (as I mentioned in a comment above the question above). What I'd do now would be to instead commit my changes to the one file in my local repo (you can use the hg record extension to only commit pieces of a file):

hg commit -m "commit message" filename

Then just push out.

hg push

If there's a conflict because other changes have been made to the repo that I need to merge first, I'd update to the parent revision (seen with "hg parents -r ." if you don't know what it is), commit my other changes there so I've got 2 heads. Then revert back to the original single file commit and pull/merge the changes into that version. Then push out the changes with

hg push --rev .

To push out only the single file and the merge of that revision. Then you can merge the two heads you've got locally.

This way gets rid of the mq stuff and the potential for rejected hunks and keeps everything tracked by source control. You can also "hg strip" revisions off if you later decide you don't want them.

N ignore-on-commit option in mercurial

If the files you want to omit from the "hg commit" command are already "tracked", you should use the -X option. The pattern passed to -X is pretty flexible, making it possible to run for example:

% hg stat
A etc/foo.conf
M src/bar.c
M lib/libbar/loader.c
% hg commit -X '**.conf'

to avoid committing any file with a ".conf" extension, regardless of how deep in the source tree it lives. In the workspace shown above this would commit "src/bar.c" and "lib/libbar/loader.c" but not "etc/foo.conf".

To exclude multiple patterns of filenames, use multiple -X options, i.e.:

% hg commit -X '**.conf' -X '**.sh'

Best Answer

Related Solutions

What’s the easiest way to commit and push a single file while leaving other modifications alone

N ignore-on-commit option in mercurial

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