howto suspend work

[Martin Geisler]

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 20:03, Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Neal Becker wrote:
>
>> I have reached a milestone, let's call it revA.  I started working on some
>> substantial change, but then realized this is not the right approach.  I
>> could just hg revert (I haven't yet committed these new changes), but I'd
>> like to keep it just in case.
>>
>> I could hg ci the new changes, and then hg update -r revA.  That's fine,
>> except the head would still be the aborted experiment.
>>
>> Suggestions?
>
> OK, so here's what I tried.
>
> hg ci -m 'experimental deadend'
>
> hg update -r revA.
>
> hack hack
>
> hg ci -m 'newer stuff based on revA'
> added 1 head
>
> OK, great.  Now I have 2 heads.  Now what?  I sure don't want to do merge,
> that would pull in the changes from 'experimental deadend'.

You write that you would like to keep the changes to preserve the
deadend (it can be nice to show it to others in the future).

To do this you can do a dummy-merge where you merge the two heads
*but* throw away all changes that come from the deadend experiment.
This is done as follows:

  HGMERGE=true hg merge
  hg revert --all --rev other-head
  hg commit -m "This was a deadend (dummy merge)."

where other-head is the head you want to keep. Setting HGMERGE to true
will signal to Mercurial that all conflicts were resolved fine -- they
wont matter since we throw them away with the revert step.

This is the easiest way in the sense that the deadend will be
communicated to other clones using the normal mechanisms (push/pull)
and so others wont have to do anything special to see it and to
discover that it has been thrown away.

If you want to remove the deadend from your clone you can do so
without extensions, too. Simply use the --rev argument to 'hg clone':

  hg clone --rev other-head . ../without-deadend

Then without-deadend will be a repository which contains other-head
and its ancestor changesets only. You can specify multiple --rev
arguments if you need to preserve several changesets in the new clone.
You can then delete or backup the repository that still has the
deadend.

-- 
Martin Geisler