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
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Dynamic Waveform Visualizations with wavesurfer.js

    Waveform images are an awesome addition to boring audio widgets.  They can be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing, allowing users to navigate audio visually.  I recently found wavesurfer.js, an amazing waveform image utility that uses to Web Audio API to create super customizable...

  • By
    Web Audio API

    The Web Audio API allows developers to load and decode audio on demand using JavaScript.  The more I evaluate awesome games for Firefox OS TVs, the more I get to learn about these APIs that I normally wouldn't touch.  The following is a very basic introduction to the WebAudio API...

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!