Mercurial : how to deal with rejected pull request?

Question

At least : how to deal with it cleanly?

Currently, the only worklow I know is : suppress your clone + re-fork from main repository. That's really underoptimal...

The other option is merging with main repo's tip, or backing out your changeset. But if you do that, will the backout appear in subsequent pull requests?

If so, it's embarrassing polluting main repo with rejected changesets and their backout...

What's the correct workflow?

Answer 1

It depends.

If your fork is public or you want to keep the rejects, something like this workflow is probably ideal:

1. Update to the tip and do hg ci --close-branch.
2. Pull from the main repository if necessary.
3. Update to the most recent changeset which belongs to the main repository, and do all work there.
4. If your repo is using the @ bookmark, move it to the new head.

If your fork is not public, you can simply strip the changesets you no longer want. Look in your repository settings for the "strip changesets" option. You will also need to execute hg strip locally on each clone of the repo; the activity feed will provide the precise command to use.

If you happen to be using the experimental Evolve extension, you can hg prune unwanted changesets instead of the procedures described above. This will leave them around, but hide them from history and prevent them from being pushed or pulled (in most circumstances). This is (intended to be) a "safe" operation that you can do to shared changesets. If anyone pulls from your repository, the changesets will be automatically pruned in their repository as well. To undo, see the hg touch command.

NB: Bitbucket will not back up changesets when you strip them. Please be careful.