Can I commit individual hunks (hg record)?
Asked by S?ren Kuklau:

In SourceTree's Preferences, the Mercurial pane mentions \`record\` among the extensions. While not enabled by default, I can tick it.

However, there doesn't appear to be any GUI-level support for making use of this: given a file with multiple changed hunks of which I only wish to commit a select few, I wouldn't know how to select those. The only per-hunk buttons available are "Discard Hunk" and "Discard Selected Lines", which I assume will revert those changes, rather than *skip* them for this commit.


Answers:
author: stevestreeting
body: Hi S?ren,

The 'record' extension must be appearing because it's included in your own .hgrc - SourceTree lets you enable additional (officially unsupported) extensions, for cases where the behaviour can be implicit - for example kbfiles.

You're right that there's no support for 'record' right now (essentially an equivalent to git staging). I have looked at it before, but right now you can only drive it using an interactive terminal, rather than via command line parameters, and driving console apps this way can be fragile from a non-terminal in my experience. That's why I haven't included it as an official option - this also applies to per-hunk shelving as well.

I hope some time in the future to be able to support this somehow, perhaps via my own extension which replicates record but with entirely command-line parameters.

Cheers

Steve

comments: author: stevestreeting
body: Yeah, I had my hopes up when I found that one myself, hoping it meant 'command line record' - but it's a curses GUI instead - damn! :)


author: S?ren Kuklau
body: Thanks for your answer. Yes; I must have added the extension on my own long ago. I had assumed the extension would provide an API, rather than only its own command-line interface. I see now that there is precedent for creating an own, different-interface extension: [http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/CrecordExtension](http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/CrecordExtension;).


author: Laurens Holst
body: The record extension still works by modifying files on the file system, committing them and then restoring them to their old self (<http://bz.selenic.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3591>). But as I understand it nowadays Mercurial has "memctx" Python objects which allow you to stage and commit individual changes in-memory. That should be useful. I would love to have the hunk and/or line selection feature in SourceTree for Mercurial as well :).


author: stevestreeting
body: Interesting, thanks. Unfortunately that would require adding an active Python runtime to SourceTree which is quite heavyweight as a solution. I'm really hoping that Mercurial eventually adds a 'stage for commit' feature.


author: Laurens Holst
body: Hi,

There's some thread right now going where the TortoiseHg developers are looking into getting patch hunk selection to work again:

<http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2013-January/047452.html>

Particularly, here is a very small extension that seems to do much of the work:

<http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2013-January/047552.html>

<http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2013-January/047558.html>

Perhaps this will be of some use to you?


author: Laurens Holst
body: Hi,

There's some thread right now going where the TortoiseHg developers are looking into getting patch hunk selection to work again:

<http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2013-January/047452.html>

Particularly, here is a very small extension that seems to do much of the work:

<http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2013-January/047552.html>

Perhaps this will be of some use to you?


Tags: hunk

mercurial