Mercurial move changes to a new branch
I have a number of changes that I committed to my local repository, but have not yet been pushed. Since on a feature is taking longer than expected, I want to swap these changes onto a named branch before I push. How can I do this?
Answer
As suggested by Mark, the MqExtension is one solution for you problem. IMHO a simpler workflow is to use the rebase extension. Suppose you have a history like this:
@ changeset: 2:81b92083cb1d
| tag: tip
| summary: my new feature: edit file a
|
o changeset: 1:8bdc4508ac7b
| summary: my new feature: add file b
|
o changeset: 0:d554afd54164
summary: initial
This means, revision 0 is the base on which you started to work on your feature. Now you want to have revisions 1-2 on a named branch, let's say my-feature. Update to revision 0 and create that branch:
$ hg up 0
$ hg branch my-feature
$ hg ci -m "start new branch my-feature"
The history now looks like this:
@ changeset: 3:b5939750b911
| branch: my-feature
| tag: tip
| parent: 0:d554afd54164
| summary: start new branch my-feature
|
| o changeset: 2:81b92083cb1d
| | summary: my new feature: edit file a
| |
| o changeset: 1:8bdc4508ac7b
|/ summary: my new feature: add file b
|
o changeset: 0:d554afd54164
summary: initial
Use the rebase command to move revisions 1-2 onto revision 3:
$ hg rebase -s 1 -d 3
This results in the following graph:
@ changeset: 3:88a90f9bbde7
| branch: my-feature
| tag: tip
| summary: my new feature: edit file a
|
o changeset: 2:38f5adf2cf4b
| branch: my-feature
| summary: my new feature: add file b
|
o changeset: 1:b5939750b911
| branch: my-feature
| summary: start new branch my-feature
|
o changeset: 0:d554afd54164
summary: initial
That's it .. as mentioned in the comments to Mark's answer, moving around already pushed changesets generally is a bad idea, unless you work in a small team where you are able to communicate and enforce your history manipulation.