Blacklisting Changesets in Mercurial

Distributed version control systems have revolutionized how software teams work, by making merges no longer scary. Developers can work on a feature in relative isolation, pulling in new changes on their schedule, and providing results back on their (manager's) timeline.

Sometimes, however, a developer working in their own branch can do something really silly, like commit a huge file without realizing it. Only after they push to the central repository does the giant size of the changeset become known. If one catches it quickly, one just removes the changeset and all is will.

If other developers have pulled that giant changeset you're in a slightly harder spot. You can remote it from your repository and ask other developers to do the same, but you can't force them to do so. Unwanted changesets let loose in a development group have a way of getting pushed back into a shared repository again and again.

To ban the pushing of a specific changeset to a Mercurial repository one can use this terse hook in the repository's .hg/hgrc file:

[hooks]
pretxnchangegroup.ban1 = ! hg id -r d2cfe91d2837+ /dev/null 2>&1

Where d2cfe91d2837 is the node id of the forbidden changeset.

That's fine for a single changeset, but if you more than a few to ban this form avoids having a hook per changeset:

[hooks]
pretxnchangegroup.ban = ! hg log --template '{node|short}\n' \
  -r $HG_NODE:tip | grep -q -x -F -f /path/to/banned

where banned /path/to/banned is a file of disallowed changesets like:

acd69df118ab
417f3c27983b
cc4e13c92dfa
6747d4a5c45d

It's probably prohibitively hard to ban changesets in everyone's repositories, but at least you can set up a filter on shared repositories and publicly shame anyone who pushes them.

Published: Jan 29, 2011, 6:34:25 AM by Ry4an Brase
Tags: mercurial, ideas-built, software
Permalink - Source code