Question

When cloning a repository in Mercurial, is there a way to create a target folder based on the latest changeset? Example:

$ hg clone http://hg.repo.com:8000/myrepo 'myrepo-$VERSION'

The folder should be named after the version of the project, e.g., myrepo-1.3.

Answer 1

If you are okay with using the changeset hash, then you can start with

$ hg identify -i http://hg.repo.com:8000/myrepo

to get the ID of the tip changeset. You can combine this with clone like this in a Unix shell:

$ hg clone http://hg.repo.com:8000/myrepo \
           "myrepo-$(hg -i identify http://hg.repo.com:8000/myrepo)"

To make it more convenient to use, I would create an alias for this:

[alias]
vclone = !DEST=$(basename "$1")-$($HG identify -i "$1");
          echo "destination directory: $DEST";
          $HG clone "$1" "$DEST"

This let’s you do hg vclone foo to get a foo-<ID> clone.

In the alias I took care of computing a suitable basename from the clone URL and to print the destination in the same way that hg clone normally does when you don’t give an explicit destination. Finally, I took care to quote the arguments so that you can clone a directory with spaces in the name. (If you also have characters like " in your names, well then you’re out of luck without better support for quoting in Mercurial shell aliases.)