What feature of Mercurial gives me "checkpoints" that I can distinguish without making frequent, hacked, small changes?

Question

I am developing a project, and I am making small research changes. After each change, I would like to compare with the previous version. However, I do not want to transfer each of these small changes to a permanent history until I am sure that the final change should be permanent. Then I would do it in one go.

What function in Mercurial allows me to do this?

Answer 1

I think you're looking for mercury queues ... this allows you to maintain a set of patches against the source without committing them. You can click and apply patches until you get the right solution, and then do it if necessary.

Good blog post here http://www.canonware.com/~ttt/2008/04/using-mercurial-patch-queues-for-daily.html

Or the official documentation here http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/advanced-uses-of-mercurial-queues.html

Answer 2

You can use MQ, as Sam mentioned, or you can just perform as usual, and then use the Minimize Extension or HistEdit Extension to put the “interim” change shifts together. You just need to make sure you don’t click them somewhere on average.