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Asked: 2026-06-02T11:22:17+00:00

I have been using Mercurial version control system for some time already and several

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I have been using Mercurial version control system for some time already and several times I have seen the system warn me about divergent renames.

What I do is make two different descendants of one larger file. Like for example I’ve had one class named HttpRequest that was a wrapper for CGI.pm. Later, when I decided to move to the PSGI protocol, I have made two copies of this file, namely Cgi.pm and Psgi.pm. The original class remains and becomes abstract with new ones inheriting from it.

I always thought that it is the preferred way to deal with such situations because each file retains the history of the file that it was based on. But when I push my changes to the remote server, it tells me this:

remote: adding changesets
remote: adding manifests
remote: adding file changes
remote: added 2 changesets with 2 changes to 2 files (+1 heads)
remote: warning: detected divergent renames of lib/HttpRequest.pm to:
remote:  lib/HttpRequest/Cgi.pm
remote:  lib/HttpRequest/Psgi.pm

Is this bad? Should I do it some other way?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It looks like the problem is not that you made versioned copies of the same source file, but that there are two changesets in which the file was renamed to a different name each time and these changesets are not in the same line of development. This observation is based on the fact that your pull created a new head.

    So in this instance, Mercurial is warning you that the pull has created a new head and as a result your repo has two heads inside each of which CGI.pm has been renamed to a different file. Therefore, if you attempt to merge these into one you will have to decide which change should stick.

    The simplest way to have prevented this would be to copy the original file instead of renaming it. More precisely, the first time you can rename it but on all subsequent occasions you have to copy it instead (obviously if you do this on the same line of development, and necessary if you do not but intend to merge divergent lines later).

    You might also want to look at the relevant section of Mercurial: The Definitive Guide.

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