Grouping a set of commits in Mercurial?

Question

I'm working on a new feature branch. It's necessary to keep all the history, but for someone scouring over the history at a later date, much of it is over verbose.

For example I may have 5 commits taking through the steps of adding a new database table, its business logic, its validation and some experiments that I change my mind about etc etc. But for a co-developer all they might need to know is "this fixed bug X".

Is it possible to somehow group a set of commits, so that an overview is shown in the log but still being able to view all the history. Not only only my local repo, but the remote repo as well.

I'm guessing that I could have separate sub-branches and merge them as I go along. But I'll only know that I want to group a set of commit retrospectively. So I don't think that is a good route, as I'll have to keep going back and forth.

I can see that there is a group extension but it's unmaintained. And my experience with unmaintained plugins means that usually I'm going the wrong way about it and that there is a perhaps a better technique.

Is there any best practice around achieving this sort of thing?

Answer 1

For what it's worth, I think you're going down the correct route when you say you want to keep all of your history available. You could use the MQ extension to collapse your changesets into a single commit, but - although this would give you a 'clean' commit - you would lose all that juicy detail.

My way of handling this is to develop on a branch or in a separate clone, and when it's going into Production I describe the whole group of changes in the commit message of the merge, i.e. don't just use "Merge" for the commit message :).

I understand your point about only knowing if you need to group retrospectively, but I think as long as you have some rigour around your dev/test/release process then this shouldn't be too much of a limitation.