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
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Firefox Marketplace Animated Buttons

    The Firefox Marketplace is an incredibly attractive, easy to use hub that promises to make finding and promoting awesome HTML5-powered web applications easy and convenient. While I don't work directly on the Marketplace, I am privy to the codebase (and so...

  • By
    Implement jQuery’s hover() Method in MooTools

    jQuery offers a quick event shortcut method called hover that accepts two functions that represent mouseover and mouseout actions. Here's how to implement that for MooTools Elements. The MooTools JavaScript We implement hover() which accepts to functions; one will be called on mouseenter and the other...

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!