CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mercurial
Aaron Powell
Aaron Powell

Reputation: 25099

Close head without committing any change

I'm working on a project which is using mercurial and it's gotten into a bit of a mess with a number of heads which for all intensive purposes are dead.

I want to kill off these heads and bring the commit graph back to a single line.

I've been told there's a way to merge branches but at the same time ignore any file changes, so essentially just merging the tree, but I can't seem to work out the command set.

Is there a way to do this, kill off branches by doing merges and ignoring the file changes? Or alternatively is there a way to bring in the graph again without the changes (which are not massively irrelevant in the project)?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 2295

Answers (2)

Binary Phile
Binary Phile

Reputation: 2668

If you are using TortoiseHg and named branches, you can select the branch option in the commit dialog to close a branch and it will allow you to commit without having an actual file change.

It will still leave you with a head, but it will be marked inactive.

Upvotes: 5

Ry4an Brase
Ry4an Brase

Reputation: 78330

I think this is just what you're looking for: Keep My or Their files when doing a merge

It'll create new merge changesets that close down the "other" head w/o taking in any of its changes. You won't end up with a linear history but you'll end up with a single head.

Other inferior answers include using hg strip or hg clone -r to eliminate the heads/anonymous-branches you don't want. They're inferior because (a) if other clones exist you can't strip it doesn't work at all and (b) they throw away history which is the opposite of good version control practice -- even work you don't think you want now may be valuable someday.

Upvotes: 3

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