Checkout the Last Public Revision with Mercurial

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!