Tracking a build from Hudson to Mercurial Repo

Question

I'm working on setting up a Hudson/Mercurial stack for development. One of the use cases I have is "As a developer, I want to update my local sandbox to a particular build number from Hudson, so I can [fix a bug, debug issues, create a branched version of code, etc.]."

So, if I see build #49 on Hudson, how do I update my local Mercurial repo to the same source code that was used to build #49?

Note: I have looked at Mercurial tags, however they don't seem quite appropriate. They require a commit, so it seems the commits will dirty up the history (each commit by a developer will show a subsequent commit from the tag operation). If this is the best there is, I guess I will have to live with it, but hoping for something better. Would probably still use tags for releases.

Answer 1

You can use the keywords extension on the hudson system to update the nodeid into some aspect of the build, possibly including the artifact names. If the Hudson job output artifacts are like: myproject-2010-02-17-2dbf7575fa46.tar.gz you certainly know how to 'hg update' to that point in time.

The keywords extension and maybe a little ant-fu make that easy to do.

Answer 2

Ok, here's the solution I ended up with:

Using the Description Setter Plugin, I set both the success and failing build description to "Mercurial ${MERCURIAL_REVISION}". Turns out the current Mercurial SCM plugin sets this environment variable to the parent changeset id.

I can then look at a build on Hudson, and if so desired, grab the changeset id and do a "hg update " on my local repo to get that revision of code.

Note that in the Mercurial plugin issue tracker there is some talk of changing this to HG_REVISION instead and adding other environment variables, so this may break at some point in the future, but works for me for now.