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Checkout the Last Public Revision with Mercurial

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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!

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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())'

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