Question

So far I haven’t been able to find a clear answer, though it’s possible that the answer is “change your workflow”.

I’ve just started playing around with Mercurial’s patch queue and I can see some serious power in it. It seems pretty awesome. In my tests, I’ve discovered that if you have a patch queue in repo1, and you pull from repo2, you can do some bad things. For example:

1. Create repos 1, and clone it.
2. Enable the queue on repo1
3. Make some commits and some patches on repo1
4. Pull changes to repo2
5. On repo1 un-apply(pop?) all your patches
6. Pull changes to repo2

Now you’ll see two different branches – which makes sense from a certain viewpoint. However, since my patches aren’t a part of repo1‘s history (at least until they’re applied), it seems like there should be a way to tell mercurial that my patches are off-limits, and only provide what’s in the “official history”.

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Mercurial phases may be the answer to this.

Starting with Mercurial v2.1, you can configure mq changesets to automatically be marked secret. secret changesets are ignored by incoming/pull and outgoing/push commands.

To enable this behavior, you need to add the following to your config:

[mq]
secret = True

Once enabled, it behaves as follows:

$ hg qpush --all
applying my-patch
now at: my-patch

$ hg phase -r .
16873: secret

$hg outgoing
comparing with https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg
searching for changes
no changes found (ignored 1 secret changesets)