TortoiseHg and multiple branches in one repo

branchmercurialtortoisehg

I really can't figure it out. I'm new to Mercurial and TortoiseHg. Read alot of docs and still cant find answer. I know that one way of branching is making a copy. Thats clear but there is another way called "named branches" but this is one thing i can't understand.

For example i I have new repo first branch is called "default". Then i added 3 branches called "test1…3". Now in repo browser i have tree like this:

* test3
|
* test2
|
* test1
|
* default

how to achieve something like this:

* test 1 
|  _______* test 2
| | ______* test 3
| ||
|//
* default

How to after branching to "branch3" switch back to "default". After adding some things and commit and switch back to "branch3"?

Best Answer

If you need an advice in TortoiseHG specifically too - then you have to open repository explorer and choose "update" for the head of branch you are interested to switch to.

Related Solutions

Git – In git, is there a simple way of introducing an unrelated branch to a repository

There is a new feature (since V1.7.2) which makes this task a little more high-level than what's in any of the other answers.

git checkout now supports the --orphan option. From the man page:

git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] --orphan <new_branch> [<start_point>]

Create a new orphan branch, named <new_branch>, started from <start_point> and switch to it. The first commit made on this new branch will have no parents and it will be the root of a new history totally disconnected from all the other branches and commits.

This doesn't do exactly what the asker wanted, because it populates the index and the working tree from <start_point> (since this is, after all, a checkout command). The only other action necessary is to remove any unwanted items from the working tree and index. Unfortunately, git reset --hard doesn't work, but git rm -rf . can be used instead (I believe this is equivalent to rm .git/index; git clean -fdx given in other answers).

In summary:

git checkout --orphan newbranch
git rm -rf .
<do work>
git add your files
git commit -m 'Initial commit'

I left <start_point> unspecified because it defaults to HEAD, and we don't really care anyway. This sequence does essentially the same thing as the command sequence in Artem's answer, just without resorting to scary plumbing commands.

Git – How to clone a single branch in Git

Note: the git1.7.10 (April 2012) actually allows you to clone only one branch:

# clone only the remote primary HEAD (default: origin/master)
git clone <url> --single-branch

# as in:
git clone <url> --branch <branch> --single-branch [<folder>]

(<url> is the URL if the remote repository, and does not reference itself the branch cloned)

You can see it in t5500-fetch-pack.sh:

test_expect_success 'single branch clone' '
  git clone --single-branch "file://$(pwd)/." singlebranch
'

Tobu comments that:

This is implicit when doing a shallow clone.
This makes git clone --depth 1 the easiest way to save bandwidth.

And since Git 1.9.0 (February 2014), shallow clones support data transfer (push/pull), so that option is even more useful now.
See more at "Is git clone --depth 1 (shallow clone) more useful than it makes out?".

"Undoing" a shallow clone is detailed at "Convert shallow clone to full clone" (git 1.8.3+)

# unshallow the current branch
git fetch --unshallow

# for getting back all the branches (see Peter Cordes' comment)
git config remote.origin.fetch refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
git fetch --unshallow

As Chris comments:

the magic line for getting missing branches to reverse --single-branch is (git v2.1.4):

git config remote.origin.fetch +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
git fetch --unshallow

With Git 2.26 (Q1 2020), "git clone --recurse-submodules --single-branch" now uses the same single-branch option when cloning the submodules.

See commit 132f600, commit 4731957 (21 Feb 2020) by Emily Shaffer (nasamuffin).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit b22db26, 05 Mar 2020)}

clone: pass --single-branch during --recurse-submodules

^{Signed-off-by: Emily Shaffer}
^{Acked-by: Jeff King}

Previously, performing "git clone --recurse-submodules --single-branch" resulted in submodules cloning all branches even though the superproject cloned only one branch.

Pipe --single-branch through the submodule helper framework to make it to 'clone' later on.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – In git, is there a simple way of introducing an unrelated branch to a repository

Git – How to clone a single branch in Git

clone: pass --single-branch during --recurse-submodules

Related Topic

`clone`: pass --single-branch during --recurse-submodules