Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Checkout the Last Public Revision with Mercurial

By  on  

I've always preferred git over Mercurial (hg) because the feature branch workflow makes organizing code and working off of master very easy. You don't get that with vanilla mercurial -- instead, commits can just sort of apply on top of each other, without much organization. Sometimes mercurial can feel a bit chaotic.

When working on Mozilla's mozilla-central repository (for your beloved Firefox!), I always start new commits off of the latest public commit. "public means it has been merged into mozilla-central, "draft" means it was created locally and is only on my machine.

Getting the last public revision ID required a bit of command line hackery and search so I found a better way to check out the last public revision:

hg checkout -r 'last(public())'

That command is a bit much to remember so I created an alias in my .bash_profile:

alias hgmaster='hg checkout -r “last(public())”’

As with every alias I create, whether a git alias or a bash alias, I wish I had created this sooner -- I'd have saved so much time!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Check All/None Checkboxes Using MooTools

    There's nothing worse than having to click every checkbox in a list. Why not allow users to click one item and every checkbox becomes checked? Here's how to do just that with MooTools 1.2. The XHTML Note the image with the ucuc ID -- that...

  • By
    Style Textarea Resizers

    Modern browsers are nice in that they allow you to style some odd properties.  Heck, one of the most popular posts on this blog is HTML5 Placeholder Styling with CSS, a tiny but useful task.  Did you know you can also restyle the textarea resizer in WebKit...

Discussion

  1. Jeremy

    What do you mean you can’t use the feature branch workflow with Mercurial?

    • David Walsh

      I guess branches are different with Mercurial, and that bookmarks don’t feel the same as branching off of master. Could just be me.

  2. glob

    It would be simpler/quicker to instead do: 

    hg checkout -r 'last(public())'
  3. agentgt

    You can also use mercurials excellent revsetalias and alias support:

    [alias]
master = update -r 'last(public())'

[revsetalias]
master = last(public())
wip = (parents(not public()) or not public() or . or head()) and not closed()

    Now You can do 

    hg update master

    or 

    hg master

    I added the revset alias wip as well which shows the changes you haven’t yet pushed to master.

    Finally for lightweight branches I highly recommend the evolve extension and just making normal mercurial named branches that you only push to your local mutable (non publishing repository). So long as the branches are in draft you can delete them which will be the case if the repository is non publishing.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!