A Mercurial Job Feature - Maintaining a Custom Job Net of Best Practice?

Question

I have been using version control systems for about 10 years, each of which obviously has its own idioms and practices.

I am currently using Mercurial development for .NET and have a special requirement that I wonder what your opinions will be in order to best achieve my goal.

We are developing a basic product that is a kind of rolling. Some customers need the product to shrink (due to cheaper licenses) or custom work. I lean toward the trunk branch (the default branch in Mercurial), do the custom work, and create the assembly.

When new work is done in the "trunk" and I need a new assembly from a specialized branch, I will merge the changes using hg merge -r CHANGESET_NUM_FROM_DEFAULT_HERE and then build.

This works fine, but a specialized branch is quickly populated with commits that are associated with the trunk and don't make much sense. This means that when I need to look at the list of changes for this thread, they are cluttered.

What I really want is to move to where the "join point" of the branch begins, so the modified list of changes contains only special flags, but the parent of the changed branch changes.

I tried using the redirect extension because it seems like it should do this, but instead it has a lot of merges and still clutter up my specialized branch.

Is there a way to keep a clean compartment on order? Or am I going to do something wrong?

Answer 1

Now your special branch cleaned up. But - if you want, do not see the merge in the branch log, just skip the log

hg help log

options:

...

-M --no-merges do not show merges

hg log -r 55:tip --template "{branch}:{rev}\n" -b default

default: 55

default: 56

default: 57

default: 60

default: 61

default: 63

default: 65

default: 66

hg log -r 55:tip --template "{branch}:{rev}\n" -b default -M

default: 55

default: 56

default: 57

default: 61

default: 65

default: 66

and screenshot of a graph from THG