Mercurial: Convert clones to branches

Question

I am trying to clean up some cloned repositories I have, basically converting clones into named branches.

What's the easiest way to do this?

Answer 1

You could use hg export to create a bundle of changes, and then hg import them to your new branches.

Let's say you have a common base, revA, and then two clones which each diverge from revA into revB and revC.

In the first clone: hg export -r revA -r revB > revB.patch
In the second clone: hg export -r revA -r revC > revC.patch

Now you have two patches containing all the changes made in the clones.

In the original repository:

hg up revA
hg branch branchB
hg commit
hg import revB.patch
hg up revA
hg branch branchC
hg commit
hg import revC.patch

And now you've got two named branches diverging from revA. If you have merges in the areas between revA->revB or revA->revC, I'm not sure this will preserve them perfectly.

Another alternative is to use the transplant extension. Or you could just push your clones' changes into one repo, and then move the heads that creates to new branches.

Answer 2

The only way you can make them named branches would be to rewrite their history, because the name of the branch is part of the history. However, if you can survive without having the branches be named in the past (the future is fine) then you can just pull all the repos into the main one (without merging!) and then label your branches once they're in.

For example, if you have MainRepo, Feature1Repo, and Feature2Repo, you would do the following:

$ cd MainRepo
$ hg pull ../Feature1Repo
$ hg pull ../Feature2Repo

Now, if you look at the DAG in something like TortoiseHg, you'll see a couple different heads. From here, you just hg up and hg branch:

$ hg up feature1headrev
$ hg branch Feature1
$ hg up feature2headrev
$ hg branch Feature2

From here forward, you'll have your named branches.

Note: If the hg pull complains about the repositories not being related, you can do an hg pull -f, which will create multiple tails in the repository. This is usually not how true branches are, but it is sometimes useful.