How to see changes in subrepos between commits

Question

I have a mercurial repo with subrepos (also mercurial). Imagine the situation where I have changed the subrepos and the main repo. Now I want to see the changes between several commits including the changes in the subrepos.

Is it possible?

I use TortoiseHG and diffmerge. In diffmerege calling for visual diff from TortoiseHg, I can't see the changes in the subrepos between several commits.

Answer 1

I can only tell you how to achieve it on the command line - but that is readily available with tortoiseHG, too:

Most commands can be made aware of subrepositories by using the -S or --subrepos flag. As such, in order to see the diff between two changesets X and Y, including those on all subrepositories, do at the main repository:

hg diff -S -rX:Y

Mind, of course, that it will not show a diff in the subrepositories if there was no change of the sub-repository version(s) committed to the main one.

Answer 2

With the versions of TortoiseHg I've used (which doesn't include the last few releases), I haven't seen a way of doing what you're asking about. There are a few options though:

• you can type commands directly in the output log window in TortoiseHg, so you can do hg diff -S -rX:Y there.
• Archive the versions of the parent repo which you want to diff to some directories (hg archive --repository <path-to-repo> -r <rev> -S -t files -- <outputfolderpath>, or in TortoiseHg, right-click the changeset, select Export -> Archive). Then use diffmerge on the archive directories. This is a bit tedious (especially if you want to diff many changesets), but you will get a "deep" visual diff.

Answer 3

In the command line you can do the following. Let us say you want to see all the changes of a subrepo named example between the changesets (in the main repo) c608f6017bd7 and 72d284a44170.

In the main repo

hg diff -rc608f6017bd7:72d284a44170 .hgsubstate | grep example

will return the changesets of the subrepo example, something like:

-001fc0acef220bcd42898ef3932dee8330ea64c0 example
+77f9db4d51c4b483607178aba91c872b0adedf1e example

Now you can see the logs and the diffs of the subrepo changes with:

cd example
hg log -r001fc0acef220bcd42898ef3932dee8330ea64c0:77f9db4d51c4b483607178aba91c872b0adedf1e
hg diff -r001fc0acef220bcd42898ef3932dee8330ea64c0:77f9db4d51c4b483607178aba91c872b0adedf1e

If you need it often, you can create a bash script named sublog like:

#!/bin/bash

r=$(hg diff -r$1:$2 .hgsubstate | grep $3 | cut -c 2-41 | tr '\n' ':' | sed 's/:$//'; echo '')
cd $3
hg log -r:$r

and use it like:

sublog c608f6017bd7 72d284a44170 example