Question

I’m using Mercurial and I’ve got into a terrible mess locally, with three heads. I can’t push, and I just want to delete all my local changes and commits and start again with totally clean code and a clean history.

In other words, I want to end up with (a) exactly the same code locally as exists in the tip of the remote branch and (b) no history of any local commits.

I know hg update -C overwrites any local changes. But how do I delete any local commits?

To be clear, I have no interest in preserving any of the work I’ve done locally. I just want the simplest way to revert back to a totally clean local checkout.

Answer 1

When the simplest way (a new hg clone) isn’t practical, I use hg strip:

% hg outgoing -l 1
% hg strip $rev # replace $rev with the revision number from outgoing

Repeat until hg outgoing stays quiet. Note that hg strip $rev obliterates $rev and all its descendants.

Note that you may have to first enable strip in your Mercurial settings.

PS: an even smarter approach is to use the revset language, and do:

% hg strip 'roots(outgoing())'