Question

I had a CSS file from a previous revision called ‘bootstrap.css’

I deleted the file and recreated a totally new file with the same name.

When I came to commit my changes, the deletion of the original bootstrap.css was detected. But the creation of the new file was not detected. Immediately after I committed, the new file was detected.

The only way I could find to get the new file into the repository was to do two separate commits.

Did I do something wrong? Is it a config issue? Or is it supposed to work like that?

(I was using TortoiseHg)

Answer 1

Mercurial does not maintain a file identity, so you cannot talk about the “old” bootstrap.css and the “new” bootstrap.css. To Mercurial, it’s just data stored under the same file name. You’ll see that

$ hg log bootstrap.css

will interleave the history of the two files — since there’s really only one file in Mercurial’s eyes.

This is normally fine and works like you would expect. You can run

$ hg remove bootstrap.css
$ echo '/* new and improved */' > bootstrap.css
$ hg add bootstrap.css

(or the equivalent from TortoiseHg) and the result is that bootstrap.css is modified:

$ hg status
M bootstrap.css

Modified just means that it’s different compared to the parent revision.