ANN: subsume extension

[Stephen Rasku]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 12:44, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-10-08 at 13:38 +0200, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 13:27, Peter Arrenbrecht
>> <peter.arrenbrecht at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I suppose this could be mentioned in the guide for getting rid of
>> > unwanted heads. We might also consider having this in Hg's core, as an
>> > option to merge.
>>
>> I'd like that. Maybe hg merge --discard? The word 'subsume' makes me
>> think a little too hard.
>
> I don't think this is the right direction. Dummy merge is a hack that
> messes up history. We should instead improve head closing and
> surrounding logic to the point where people don't care any more.

Long term I agree with you.  However, this provides a solution for
already existing repositories.  We have converted our CVS repository
to Mercurial and it has tons of dangling heads even though the code
has been merged.  If I could do a dummy merge then I could see which
branches are merged where without having to decipher it from the
commit messages.  It will append an extra changeset to the merged
branch but there's no way to merge to the proper revision without
changing all the changeset IDs.  It's not ideal but it's better than
what our repository looks like now.

...Stephen