Mercurial and Heptapod short tutorial for FluidDynď
Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. Itâs is a great tool and if you are doing research (coding and/or writing papers), you should use a version control software! It seems to me that Mercurial is a good solution for researchers (in particular it is in my opinion simpler and nicer to learn and use than Git).
Mercurial couples very well with the programs TortoiseHG and Meld (if you can, just install them, especially Meld).
There are a lot of tutorials and documentations about Mercurial (for example the official Mercurial tutorial). In this page, I focus on what is needed to use and develop FluidDyn.
Heptapod is a friendly fork of GitLab Community Edition supporting Mercurial.
Installationď
With TortoiseHG (simple for Windows)ď
Download the installer from https://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/.
With conda (cross-platform, recommended for Linux and macOS)ď
On Windows, macOS and Linux, one can use conda
(installed with miniconda) to install Mercurial with
few extensions (hg-evolve and hg-git). On Windows, these commands have to be run in the
Anaconda Prompt. First, we need to install conda-app in the base conda environment:
conda activate base
pip install conda-app
Then, with the conda-forge channel added (conda config --add channels conda-forge
), one just needs to run:
conda-app install mercurial
Open a new terminal and the Mercurial command hg
should be available.
Note
If you donât use TortoiseHG, you should really install the visual diff and merge tool Meld!
Set-up Mercurialď
You need to create a file ~/.hgrc
. For a good starting point, you can use
the command:
hg config --edit
An example of configuration file:
[ui]
username=myusername <email@adress.org>
editor=emacs -nw
tweakdefaults = True
[extensions]
hgext.extdiff =
# only to use Mercurial with GitHub and Gitlab
hggit =
# specific extension for FluidDyn dev
hgfluiddyn =
# more advanced extensions (really useful for FluidDyn dev)
churn =
shelve =
rebase =
absorb =
evolve =
topic =
[extdiff]
cmd.meld =
The line starting with hggit is optional and enables the extension hg-git. This extension is useful to work on projects using Git, for example hosted on Github and Gitlab.
The extensions churn, shelve, rebase, absorb, evolve and topic are very useful for more advanced users. Note that evolve and topic comes from the package hg-evolve.
Warning
We wrote a specific Mercurial extension for FluidDyn development called hg-fluiddyn. All FluidDyn contributors / developers / maintainers should install and activate it!
With Mercurial installed with conda-app
(as explained above), just run:
conda run -n _env_mercurial pip install hg-fluiddyn
and activate the extension with the line hgfluiddyn =
in the file
~/.hgrc
.
Warning
For development of FluidDyn packages, the evolve and topic extensions have to be installed and activated! If they are not activated, the hg-fluiddyn extension will warn you!
Get helpď
To get help on Mercurial, one can start with:
hg help
or for a specific command (here clone
):
hg help clone
Simple workflowď
To make a copy of an existing repository:
hg clone https://foss.heptapod.net/fluiddyn/fluiddyn
To get a summary of the working directory state:
hg summary
or just hg sum
.
To show changed files in the working directory:
hg status
or just hg st
.
If you add new files or if you deleted files:
hg add name_of_the_file
hg remove name_of_the_file
This command is also very usefull:
hg addre
Each time you did some consistent changes:
hg commit
or:
hg commit -m "A message explaining the commit"
I would advice to run after a commit command hg st
to check that you did
what you wanted to do. If you are unhappy with the commit, you can amend it
with another commit with:
hg commit --amend
To push the state of your working repository to your repository on the web:
hg push
The inverse command (pull all commits from the remote repository) is:
hg pull
Get the last version of a codeď
First pull all the changesets from the remote repository:
hg pull
Then update the code to the tip:
hg update
or just hg up
. You can also directly do:
hg pull -u
Read the historyď
You can get a list of the changesets with:
hg log --graph
or just hg log -G
. With the --graph
or -G
option, the revisions are
shown as an ASCII art.
Update the code to an old revisionď
Use hg up 220
to update to the revision 220. We can use a tag, bookmark,
topic name or branch name instead of a number. To get a clean copy, add the
option -C
(beware).
Create a repository from a directoryď
Create a new repository in the given directory by doing:
hg init
Merge-Request based workflow with hg-evolveď
We now use a Merge-Request (MR) based workflow for the development of FluidDyn packages.
Note
GitLabâs âmerge requestsâ are equivalent to GitHubâs âpull requestsâ.
Note
In contrast to the standard workflow in Github and Gitlab, you donât need to fork the repository to create Merge Requests.
Instead, you need to become a âdeveloperâ of the project. The developers have the permission to push changesets (i.e. âcommitsâ) in a topic in the main repository (for example https://foss.heptapod.net/fluiddyn/fluidsim). To acquire the âdeveloperâ role, please send a message in an issue or if needed, create a dedicated issue.
Topics are used in Mercurial for âlightweight branchesâ (like Git branches). If
you are unfamiliar with Mercurial topics, you can read this tutorial,
but what follows should be sufficient for FluidDyn development. The principle
is that you first create a topic (with hg topic name_of_my_topic
). Once a
topic is activated, the changesets created belong to this topic. The new
changesets gathered in a topic can be pushed into the main repository. Even
after having been pushed into the main repository, they stay in the draft
phase (which means they can be modified, as opposed to public
changesets.
Run hg help phases
for more info).
To list the topics:
hg topics
To activate a topic already created:
hg up the_name_of_the_topic
To deactivate the topic and come back to the tip of the default branch:
hg up default
To get the list of the changesets in the active topic (very useful):
hg stack
Developers have to create Merge Requests to get things merged in the targeted branch (which is usually default for FluidDyn packages). Letâs present an example. A FluidDyn developer can do (here, we use ssh but you can also use https):
hg clone ssh://hg@foss.heptapod.net/fluiddyn/fluidsim
hg topic fix_something
hg commit -m "Fix a bug related to ..."
hg push
Mercurial is going to print an URL to create the associated MR. Once created, the MR should then be reviewed by a âmaintainerâ. Only maintainers have the right to merge a MR, i.e. to publish changesets. The maintainer can tell you how to modify your MR and s-he can also directly modify the changesets of the MR!
We strongly advice to install and activate the evolve, rebase and absorb
extensions locally (see the example of .hgrc
above). This gives a very nice
user experience for the MRs, with the ability to modify a MR with hg absorb
and safe history editing.
Tip
hg absorb
is very useful during code review. Let say that a developer
submitted a PR containing few commits. As explained in this blog post,
hg absorb
is a mechanism to automatically and intelligently incorporate
uncommitted changes into prior commits. Edit the files to take into account
the remarks of the code review and just run:
hg absorb
hg push
and the PR is updated!
Tip
If you are asked to ârebaseâ your MR, it should work with the following commands:
hg pull
hg up name_of_my_topic
hg rebase
hg push
Documenting the merge-request with towncrierď
Notable changes are announced in the changes page during a release. A news fragment is required to ensure to describe the MR. To do that, install towncrier (as of today, July 2020, the git master version is required) and create a new fragment:
pip install https://github.com/twisted/towncrier/archive/master.zip
towncrier create <MERGE_REQUEST>.<TYPE>
where <MERGE_REQUEST>
should be the merge-request number and <TYPE>
should be one of added
, changed
, deprecated
, removed
, fixed
or security
. Once created, the contents have to be edited in manually,
committed and pushed along with the MR. Read more about creating news
fragments.
Working with hggit and Githubď
To clone a git repository:
hg clone git+ssh://git@github.com/serge-sans-paille/pythran.git
or just:
hg clone https://github.com/serge-sans-paille/pythran.git
Git branches are represented as Mercurial bookmarks so such commands can be useful:
hg log --graph
hg up master
hg help bookmarks
# list the bookmarks
hg bookmarks
# put the bookmark master where you are
hg book master
# deactivate the active bookmark (-i like --inactive)
hg book -i
Note
bookmarks
, bookmark
and book
correspond to the same
mercurial command.
Warning
If a bookmark is active, hg pull -u
or hg up
will move the bookmark
to the tip of the active branch. You may not want that so it is important to
always deactivate an unused bookmark with hg book -i
or with hg up master
.
Do not forget to place the bookmark master
as wanted.
Github mirror for FluidDyn maintainersď
For fluiddyn maintainers, we can add in the file .hg/hgrc
something like:
[paths]
default = ssh://hg@foss.heptapod.net/fluiddyn/fluidimage
github = git+ssh://git@github.com/fluiddyn/fluidimage
And in ~/.hgrc
:
[alias]
update_github = !hg pull && hg up default && hg book master && hg push github -B master && hg book master -d
A quite complicated example with hg-gitď
We open a PR:
hg pull
hg up master
hg book fix/a_bug
# Modify/add/remove files
hg commit -m "A commit message"
hg push -B fix/a_bug
We want to change something in the commit of the PR. We first try hg absorb
.
Letâs say that we are in a situation for which it does not work:
# Modify/add/remove files
hg commit -m "A different commit message" --amend
# clean up Git commit map after history editing
hg git-cleanup
hg pull
hg push -B fix/a_bug --force
Delete a bookmark in a remote repository (close a remote Git branch)ď
With Mercurial, we can do:
hg bookmark --delete <bookmark name>
hg push --bookmark <bookmark name>
Unfortunately, it does not work for a remote Git repository (with hg-git). We have to use a Git client, clone the repository with Git and do something like:
# this deletes the branch locally
git branch --delete <branch name>
# this deletes the branch in the remote repository
git push origin --delete <branch name>