How to 'hg merge' without affecting the working directory?

Question

Suppose that:

• I have a repo called MyRepo.
• I have uncommitted changes in my working directory.
• I do a pull from Repo1 and that creates a branch in MyRepo
• I want to do a merge of what I already had in my repo with what I have just pulled.

As described here, the merge process changes the state of the working directory.

In my scenario, I don't want to loose the uncommitted changes that are in my working directory because at that point, I'm interested in changing the state of MyRepo; not the state of my working directory.

Is there a way to go through the merging process, including resolving conflicts manually, without affecting the content my working directory? Can this process be done in temporary files only? Or should I shelve my changes, do the merge and then unshelve to restore my working dir to the state it was before the merge?

Answer 1

You could clone your repository to your latest checkin, merge the changes with the clone, commit, and then pull the new changeset from your cloned repository back into your current one.

Answer 2

Use shelve or attic extensions to temporarily stash your changes while you merge.