How can I import a mercurial repo (including history) into another mercurial repo as a subdirectory, without using subrepos?

Question

This sounds kind of complex, so let me explain:

Project_A has lived for some time within its own Mercurial repository. Project_A is now getting folded into a new super project, Super-Project_B. Super-Project_B also has a mercurial repository. We would prefer if Project_A were not a subrepo, but instead just a normal child, but we also don't want to lose the history. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Yeah. Use the convert extension to move projectA down one directory level:

hg convert --filemap filemap.txt projectA projectA-redone

where your filemap.txt has this line in it:

rename . projectA

(that dot might be a slash but I don't think so).

That will give you a new repo, projectA-redone, that has all the history of A though all the changesets will have different hashes since their content (paths) have changed to get "projectA" in front of all of them.

Then you go into Super-Project_B and do a hg pull -f /path/to/projectA-redone. You need the -f because otherwise you'll be told that the repos are unrelated since they have no changesets in common.

Finally you'll do a hg merge in Super_project_b which should have no conflicts (unless you already had a projectA directory, in which case you should've picked a different name or hg removed it first).

After doing that B will have all of A inside the projectA subdirectory and all history will be intact.