Mercurial commit only tip

Question

In my setup I have a central Hg repo to which I'm pushing my local changes. Say in my local clone I have a series of local commits and then I want to push the changes to the central repo. How can I push only the final state without including all of the "small" local commits that I made?

I want this because sometimes I dont want to pollute the central repo's history with all of the small local commits that I made.

Answer 1

Why would you want to do that? Committing small changes makes it easy to revert something. If you collect everything in one big commit, reverting a small change might not be as easy.

Answer 2

It is possible to rewrite your history using the mq extension. Suppose the revisions you want to collapse are revs, 5,6,7 with 7 being the tip. You would accomplish this via:

# Import the revs you want to collapse into mq
# mq will create patches for each revision from 5:tip, with the name
# <local rev number>.diff
hg qimport -r5:tip
# Goto the first commit
hg qgoto 5.diff
# Fold in the other commits successively. Aside from shell magic, there is
# no command line way to specify multiple patches at once.
hg qfold 6.diff
hg qfold 7.diff
# Commit the new mq patch as a changeset of its own
hg qfinish 5.diff

Now, your repository contains only a rev 5 with the contents of what was previously revisions 5, 6, and 7.

Answer 3

I agree with bjorn (and I'm upvoting his answer), what you're doing isn't a great idea -- meaningful history is a good thing. If you can't be talked out of it then what you're trying to do isn't just push the last changeset but a new changeset that is a combination of all those changesets. The easiest way to do that is to use the collapse extension, though mq or even export/import can do it. The key there is that in collapsing multiple changesets into one you're rewriting history and you're going to remove your existing changesets and replace them with that new combined changeset. Doing so violates the immutability of history that makes Mercurial so trust worthy.

Answer 4

How to do this without any extensions is explained in the mercurial wiki page ConcatenatingChangesets.

That page also links to a few alternative approaches with hg extensions, like the CollapseExtension.