Mercurial: How to deal with one branch that has two heads

Question

What if one branch has two heads? I came to this situation weeks ago for some reason I didn't merged them back then and just continued developing on one head. Now I want to get rid of the other head. What should I do? Should I just merge them after so many changesets?

Answer 1

So you have this:

o--o--o--A--B  <- older unnecessary head        \         1--2--3--4--5--6  <- newer ‘good’ head 

...and you don't need A and B, absolutely, 100% sure. If you aren't sure, and there are possibly salvageable things in A and B, better merge the heads to combine the changes. As Aaron said, Mercurial is good at it.

Now you have two options:

• get rid of the old head, or
• do a dummy merge of two heads that ignores head B.

If changesets A and B are present in other repositories you don't control, e.g. if other people pulled A and B into their repositories, or you pushed A and B to a public repository (say, Bitbucket), then you've released A and B into the wild, and can't get rid of them. You should do a dummy merge:

$ hg up 6 $ hg --config ui.merge=internal:local merge 

This will ignore any changes from A and B when merging.

If, on the other hand, A and B are private, you can either strip them:

$ hg strip A 

(Rev A and descendants stripped; enable the MQ extension to make strip available.)

Or, make a new clone of your repository without changesets A and B:

$ hg clone myrepo myrepo2-clone -r 6 

(Only rev 6 and ancestors added to the clone.)