Question

I have a single-person single-folder mercurial repository. The directory structure is simple:

P104
  lecture_notes
    files under version control live here  

After a while I realize I want to have two directories within the repository, like this

P104
  lecture_notes
    files under version control live here  (.hg is here)
  homework
    more files under version control

Now, if I’m just trying to add files to the repository, it fails:

br@ymir:~/P104/lecture_notes$ ll ..
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 4 br br 4096 2012-02-02 18:05 ./
drwxr-xr-x 4 br br 4096 2012-02-01 20:46 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 br br 4096 2012-02-02 17:44 homework/
drwxr-xr-x 4 br br 4096 2012-02-02 18:06 lecture_notes/
br@ymir:~/P104/lecture_notes$ hg add ../homework/hw1_P104.tex 
abort: ../homework/hw1_P104.tex not under root

My first idea was to clone the repo one level up in the directory structure, add files to the clone, and delete the original repo. But even cloning fails:

br@ymir:~/P104/2011/lecture_notes$ hg clone . ..
abort: destination '..' is not empty

So the question is whether there’s a Mercurial-ish way of doing this other than creating a clean repository somewhere else and copying files manually?

Answer 1

If the root directory of your Mercurial repo is under ~/P104/lecture_notes, I would rather:

1. rename lecture_notes into P104
2. make a subdirectory lecture_notes
3. move all the existing files in that new sub-directory
4. add homework and its files in the renamed P104 directory
5. hg add everything

The idea is to keep the .hg repo where it is (~/P104/lecture_notes renamed into ~/P104/P104) and reorganize the files within that renamed directory.
No need to clone.