How to revert a Mercurial hg pull?

Question

If you do an hg pull and then an hg update (or an hg merge), is there a way to back this out? Ie: revert your repository to the state prior to doing the hg pull?

I believe you can do hg update -r n where you would specify the changeset prior to the pull as n. Though I'm guessing this will still leave the changesets in your repository but this isn't really what we want. ??

Answer 1

hg strip will remove revisions from a repository. Like all powerful commands, its dangerous, so be careful.

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/StripExtension

Also see:

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/EditingHistory

If you catch your mistake immediately (or reasonably soon), you can just use hg strip REV to roll back the latest (one or more) changes. ...

Answer 2

Ok, you can't rollback because you've done a commit. What you can do is use 'hg strip' which is part of mq (after 2.8 strip is in it's own extension), or use mq to remove the changes. Either way I suggest you do everything on another clone, just in case.

To do strip, update to a revision that you want to keep, and then

hg strip <REV>

where <REV> is the first revision you want to remove. It will remove that one and all decendents (including your merge commit).

Alternatively you can

hg qnew (if you don't already have a patch queue)
hg qimport <REV>

which will import a single revision into the patch queue. You can then add more, and then use the mq commands to edit, rearrange, delete, or whatever you want to do with those revisions. qdel deletes the current patch.

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Edit: Obviously, you'll need to enable the MQ extension for both of these, unless you're using 2.8 or later. In that case strip is in the strip extension, and mq in the mq extension. Both are shipped with the standard installation.