With Mercurial, how can I "compress" a series of changesets into one before pushing?
Let's say I have a local and a remote Mercurial repository. Now, I start working on a feature. I work on it, and when I think it's done, I commit the changeset. Testing it a bit more, I find that I could further improve this feature by tweaking something in the code. I make the change and commit. 20 minutes later, I find there's a bug in this new feature, so I fix it and commit that too.
I now have 3 changesets that I would really like to push to the remote repository as one changeset with message "Implementing feature X", for instance.
How can I do this without much hassle? I believe I could do it with patches, but it seems like a lot of work.
Answer
The histedit extension is exactly what you are looking for.
hg histedit -o
or
hg histedit --outgoing
will bring up a list of the outgoing changesets. From the list you can
- Fold 2 or more changesets creating one single changeset
- Drop changesets removing them from the history
- Reorder changesets however you like.
histedit will prompt you for the new commit message of the folded changesets which it defaults to the two messages with "\n***\n" separating them.
You can also get similar results using the mq extension, but it is a lot more difficult.
You can also use the collapse extension to just do folding, but it doesn't provide as nice a UI and doesn't provide a way to edit the resulting commit message. Editing the resulting commit message also allows for cleaning up the final message, which is something I always end up utilizing.