mercurial windows batch file for pulling changes to multiple repositories

Question

Hi all, I am a mercurial user on windows and I am trying to write a batch file to check for incoming changes to a number of repositories stored in a common folder (i.e. there could be 10 or so small mercurial repos under a main folder). I have the following batch file that successfully iterates through the multiple repositories and runs hg incoming. However I can't seem to get it to execute hg -pull -u when a repository is found that has remote changes.

   FOR /D /r %%G in (".hg*") DO (
    @echo Processing: %%G
    cd /d %%G\.. 
    hg incoming
    IF NOT ERRORLEVEL 0 (
     echo Pulling changes from the server
     hg pull -u
    )
    cd..
    )

I am pretty sure the problem lies with the If statement. hg incoming doesn't seem to have a return value that can be interpreted by the ERRORLEVEL. Is this the right approach or should I be using python instead?

Answer 1

The exit code for hg incoming and hg outgoing is 1 is there were no incoming/outgoing changesets and 0 otherwise. This is apparently not really documented anywhere, but it means that your test is backwards.

Also, doing both hg incoming and hg pull does the job twice: you should simply use hg pull. The help for hg incoming says:

For remote repository, using --bundle avoids downloading the changesets twice if the incoming is followed by a pull.

So you're actually downloading all changesets twice, using twice the bandwidth.