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1 1 Mercurial Frequently Asked Questions
2 2 ====================================
3 3
4 4 Section 1: General Usage
5 5 ------------------------
6 6
7 7 .Q. I did an "hg pull" and my working directory is empty!
8 8
9 9 There are two parts to Mercurial: the repository and the working
10 10 directory. "hg pull" pulls all new changes from a remote repository
11 11 into the local one but doesn't alter the working directory.
12 12
13 13 This keeps you from upsetting your work in progress, which may not be
14 14 ready to merge with the new changes you've pulled and also allows you
15 15 to manage merging more easily (see below about best practices).
16 16
17 17 To update your working directory, run "hg update". If you're sure you
18 18 want to update your working directory on a pull, you can also use "hg
19 19 pull -u". This will refuse to merge or overwrite local changes.
20 20
21 21
22 22 .Q. What are revision numbers, changeset IDs, and tags?
23 23
24 24 Mercurial will generally allow you to refer to a revision in three
25 25 ways: by revision number, by changeset ID, and by tag.
26 26
27 27 A revision number is a simple decimal number that corresponds with the
28 28 ordering of commits in the local repository. It is important to
29 29 understand that this ordering can change from machine to machine due
30 30 to Mercurial's distributed, decentralized architecture.
31 31
32 32 This is where changeset IDs come in. A changeset ID is a 160-bit
33 33 identifier that uniquely describes a changeset and its position in the
34 34 change history, regardless of which machine it's on. This is
35 35 represented to the user as a 40 digit hexadecimal number. As that
36 36 tends to be unwieldy, Mercurial will accept any unambiguous substring
37 37 of that number when specifying versions. It will also generally print
38 38 these numbers in "short form", which is the first 12 digits.
39 39
40 40 You should always use some form of changeset ID rather than the local
41 41 revision number when discussing revisions with other Mercurial users
42 42 as they may have different revision numbering on their system.
43 43
44 44 Finally, a tag is an arbitrary string that has been assigned a
45 45 correspondence to a changeset ID. This lets you refer to revisions
46 46 symbolically.
47 47
48 48
49 49 .Q. What are branches, heads, and the tip?
50 50
51 51 The central concept of Mercurial is branching. A 'branch' is simply
52 52 an independent line of development. In most other version control
53 53 systems, all users generally commit to the same line of development
54 54 called 'the trunk' or 'the main branch'. In Mercurial, every developer
55 55 effectively works on a private branch and there is no internal concept
56 56 of 'the main branch'.
57 57
58 58 Thus Mercurial works hard to make repeated merging between branches
59 59 easy. Simply run "hg pull" and "hg update -m" and commit the result.
60 60
61 61 'Heads' are simply the most recent commits on a branch. Technically,
62 62 they are changesets which have no children. Merging is the process of
63 63 joining points on two branches into one, usually at their current
64 64 heads. Use "hg heads" to find the heads in the current repository.
65 65
66 66 The 'tip' is the most recently changed head, and also the highest
67 67 numbered revision. If you have just made a commit, that commit will be
68 the head. Alternately, if you have just pulled from another
68 the tip. Alternately, if you have just pulled from another
69 69 repository, the tip of that repository becomes the current tip.
70 70
71 71 The 'tip' is the default revision for many commands such as update,
72 72 and also functions as a special symbolic tag.
73 73
74 74
75 75 .Q. How does merging work?
76 76
77 77 The merge process is simple. Usually you will want to merge the tip
78 78 into your working directory. Thus you run "hg update -m" and Mercurial
79 79 will incorporate the changes from tip into your local changes.
80 80
81 81 The first step of this process is tracing back through the history of
82 82 changesets and finding the 'common ancestor' of the two versions that
83 83 are being merged. This is done on a project-wide and a file by file
84 84 basis.
85 85
86 86 For files that have been changed in both projects, a three-way merge
87 87 is attempted to add the changes made remotely into the changes made
88 88 locally. If there are conflicts between these changes, the user is
89 89 prompted to interactively resolve them.
90 90
91 91 Mercurial uses a helper tool for this, which is usually found by the
92 92 hgmerge script. Example tools include tkdiff, kdiff3, and the classic
93 93 RCS merge.
94 94
95 95 After you've completed the merge and you're satisfied that the results
96 96 are correct, it's a good idea to commit your changes. Mercurial won't
97 97 allow you to perform another merge until you've done this commit as
98 98 that would lose important history that will be needed for future
99 99 merges.
100 100
101 101
102 102 .Q. How do tags work in Mercurial?
103 103
104 104 Tags work slightly differently in Mercurial than most revision
105 105 systems. The design attempts to meet the following requirements:
106 106
107 107 - be version controlled and mergeable just like any other file
108 108 - allow signing of tags
109 109 - allow adding a tag to an already committed changeset
110 110 - allow changing tags in the future
111 111
112 112 Thus Mercurial stores tags as a file in the working dir. This file is
113 113 called .hgtags and consists of a list of changeset IDs and their
114 114 corresponding tags. To add a tag to the system, simply add a line to
115 115 this file and then commit it for it to take effect. The "hg tag"
116 116 command will do this for you and "hg tags" will show the currently
117 117 effective tags.
118 118
119 119 Note that because tags refer to changeset IDs and the changeset ID is
120 120 effectively the sum of all the contents of the repository for that
121 121 change, it is impossible in Mercurial to simultaneously commit and add
122 122 a tag. Thus tagging a revision must be done as a second step.
123 123
124 124
125 125 .Q. What if I want to just keep local tags?
126 126
127 127 You can use "hg tag" command with an option "-l" or "--local". This
128 128 will store the tag in the file .hg/localtags, which will not be
129 129 distributed or versioned. The format of this file is identical to the
130 130 one of .hgtags and the tags stored there are handled the same.
131 131
132 132
133 133 .Q. How do tags work with multiple heads?
134 134
135 135 The tags that are in effect at any given time are the tags specified
136 136 in each head, with heads closer to the tip taking precedence. Local
137 137 tags override all other tags.
138 138
139 139
140 140 .Q. What are some best practices for distributed development with Mercurial?
141 141
142 142 First, merge often! This makes merging easier for everyone and you
143 143 find out about conflicts (which are often rooted in incompatible
144 144 design decisions) earlier.
145 145
146 146 Second, don't hesitate to use multiple trees locally. Mercurial makes
147 147 this fast and light-weight. Typical usage is to have an incoming tree,
148 148 an outgoing tree, and a separate tree for each area being worked on.
149 149
150 150 The incoming tree is best maintained as a pristine copy of the
151 151 upstream repository. This works as a cache so that you don't have to
152 152 pull multiple copies over the network. No need to check files out here
153 153 as you won't be changing them.
154 154
155 The outgoing tree contains all the changes you intend for merger into
155 The outgoing tree contains all the changes you intend for merge into
156 156 upsteam. Publish this tree with 'hg serve" or hgweb.cgi or use 'hg
157 157 push" to push it to another publicly availabe repository.
158 158
159 159 Then, for each feature you work on, create a new tree. Commit early
160 160 and commit often, merge with incoming regularly, and once you're
161 161 satisfied with your feature, pull the changes into your outgoing tree.
162 162
163 163
164 164 .Q. How do I import from a repository created in a different SCM?
165 165
166 166 Take a look at contrib/convert-repo. This is an extensible
167 167 framework for converting between repository types.
168 168
169 169
170 170 .Q. What about Windows support?
171 171
172 172 Patches to support Windows are being actively integrated, a fully
173 173 working Windows version is probably not far off
174 174
175 175
176 176 Section 2: Bugs and Features
177 177 ----------------------------
178 178
179 179 .Q. I found a bug, what do I do?
180 180
181 181 Report it to the mercurial mailing list, mercurial@selenic.com.
182 182
183 183
184 184 .Q. What should I include in my bug report?
185 185
186 186 Enough information to reproduce or diagnose the bug. If you can, try
187 187 using the hg -v and hg -d switches to figure out exactly what
188 188 Mercurial is doing.
189 189
190 190 If you can reproduce the bug in a simple repository, that is very
191 191 helpful. The best is to create a simple shell script to automate this
192 192 process, which can then be added to our test suite.
193 193
194 194
195 195 .Q. Can Mercurial do <x>?
196 196
197 197 If you'd like to request a feature, send your request to
198 198 mercurial@selenic.com. As Mercurial is still very new, there are
199 certainly features it is missing and you can give up feedback on how
199 certainly features it is missing and you can give us feedback on how
200 200 best to implement them.
201 201
202 202
203 203 Section 3: Technical
204 204 --------------------
205 205
206 206 .Q. What limits does Mercurial have?
207 207
208 208 Mercurial currently assumes that single files, indices, and manifests
209 209 can fit in memory for efficiency.
210 210
211 211 Offsets in revlogs are currently tracked with 32 bits, so a revlog for
212 212 a single file can currently not grow beyond 4G.
213 213
214 214 There should otherwise be no limits on file name length, file size,
215 215 file contents, number of files, or number of revisions.
216 216
217 217 The network protocol is big-endian.
218 218
219 219 File names cannot contain the null character. Committer addresses
220 220 cannot contain newlines.
221 221
222 222 Mercurial is primarily developed for UNIX systems, so some UNIXisms
223 223 may be present in ports.
224 224
225 225
226 226 .Q. How does Mercurial store its data?
227 227
228 228 The fundamental storage type in Mercurial is a "revlog". A revlog is
229 229 the set of all revisions of a named object. Each revision is either
230 230 stored compressed in its entirety or as a compressed binary delta
231 231 against the previous version. The decision of when to store a full
232 232 version is made based on how much data would be needed to reconstruct
233 233 the file. This lets us ensure that we never need to read huge amounts
234 234 of data to reconstruct a object, regardless of how many revisions of it
235 235 we store.
236 236
237 237 In fact, we should always be able to do it with a single read,
238 238 provided we know when and where to read. This is where the index comes
239 239 in. Each revlog has an index containing a special hash (nodeid) of the
240 240 text, hashes for its parents, and where and how much of the revlog
241 241 data we need to read to reconstruct it. Thus, with one read of the
242 242 index and one read of the data, we can reconstruct any version in time
243 243 proportional to the object size.
244 244
245 245 Similarly, revlogs and their indices are append-only. This means that
246 246 adding a new version is also O(1) seeks.
247 247
248 248 Revlogs are used to represent all revisions of files, manifests, and
249 249 changesets. Compression for typical objects with lots of revisions can
250 250 range from 100 to 1 for things like project makefiles to over 2000 to
251 251 1 for objects like the manifest.
252 252
253 253
254 254 .Q. How are manifests and changesets stored?
255 255
256 256 A manifest is simply a list of all files in a given revision of a
257 257 project along with the nodeids of the corresponding file revisions. So
258 258 grabbing a given version of the project means simply looking up its
259 manifest and reconstruction all the file revisions pointed to by it.
259 manifest and reconstructing all the file revisions pointed to by it.
260 260
261 261 A changeset is a list of all files changed in a check-in along with a
262 262 change description and some metadata like user and date. It also
263 263 contains a nodeid to the relevent revision of the manifest.
264 264
265 265
266 266 .Q. How do Mercurial hashes get calculated?
267 267
268 268 Mercurial hashes both the contents of an object and the hash of its
269 269 parents to create an identifier that uniquely identifies an object's
270 270 contents and history. This greatly simplifies merging of histories
271 271 because it avoid graph cycles that can occur when a object is reverted
272 272 to an earlier state.
273 273
274 274 All file revisions have an associated hash value. These are listed in
275 275 the manifest of a given project revision, and the manifest hash is
276 276 listed in the changeset. The changeset hash is again a hash of the
277 277 changeset contents and its parents, so it uniquely identifies the
278 278 entire history of the project to that point.
279 279
280 280
281 281 .Q. What checks are there on repository integrity?
282 282
283 283 Every time a revlog object is retrieved, it is checked against its
284 284 hash for integrity. It is also incidentally doublechecked by the
285 285 Adler32 checksum used by the underlying zlib compression.
286 286
287 287 Running 'hg verify' decompresses and reconstitutes each revision of
288 288 each object in the repository and cross-checks all of the index
289 289 metadata with those contents.
290 290
291 291 But this alone is not enough to ensure that someone hasn't tampered
292 292 with a repository. For that, you need cryptographic signing.
293 293
294 294
295 295 .Q. How does signing work with Mercurial?
296 296
297 297 Take a look at the hgeditor script for an example. The basic idea is
298 298 to use GPG to sign the manifest ID inside that changelog entry. The
299 299 manifest ID is a recursive hash of all of the files in the system and
300 300 their complete history, and thus signing the manifest hash signs the
301 301 entire project contents.
302 302
303 303
304 304 .Q. What about hash collisions? What about weaknesses in SHA1?
305 305
306 306 The SHA1 hashes are large enough that the odds of accidental hash collision
307 307 are negligible for projects that could be handled by the human race.
308 308 The known weaknesses in SHA1 are currently still not practical to
309 309 attack, and Mercurial will switch to SHA256 hashing before that
310 310 becomes a realistic concern.
311 311
312 312 Collisions with the "short hashes" are not a concern as they're always
313 313 checked for ambiguity and are still long enough that they're not
314 314 likely to happen for reasonably-sized projects (< 1M changes).
315 315
316 316
317 317
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