Evolve Extension

This extension is not distributed along with Mercurial releases

Author: Pierre-Yves David for Various company

This feature is experimental, to be used only by experienced Mercurial users that understand the underlying concepts

Code repository: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/evolve/

1. Introduction

The evolve extension is an experimental implementation of the ChangesetEvolution concept. Most of its content has been moved into core except:

• additional history rewriting commands
• the evolve command to automatically solve troubles
• some user interface warning messages related to obsolete changeset troubles

The evolve extension enables the ChangesetEvolution feature, changing some of Mercurial's default behavior.

• history rewriting commands do not strip changesets anymore; they make them obsolete.
• history rewriting commands will work on any changesets, possibly creating unstable changesets.

• pull and push exchange obsolescence data with other evolve-enabled repositories - this may have a performance impact!

Current official Documentation: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/doc/evolution/

2. Additional Commands

uncommit

extracts changes from a commit into the working directory

fold

gathers changes from multiple changesets into a single one

prune

discards changesets (using obsolescence markers)

touch

replaces a changeset with a different one containing the same payload, but with a different hash

prev

moves to the parent of the current changeset

next

moves to the child of the current changeset

evolve

automatically resolves troubles affecting changesets

3. Additional UI Messages

• a warning is issued when the current working directory parent becomes obsolete
• a warning is issued when a command results in more troubled changesets

4. Setup

First you have to download the extension code. Pick a directory <dir> in your working environment, cd into that and clone evolve. Like this:

$ cd <dir>
$ hg clone https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/evolve/

Then configure your .hgrc to enable the extension by adding the following lines (remember to replace <dir> with the path where you just cloned the extension):

[extensions]
evolve = <dir>/evolve/hgext/evolve.py

We have various compatibility branch (check hg branches), but we recommend using evolve with the latest Stable mercurial version