Merge Mercurial branch into default

In a previous post I wrote a quick recipe for doing a merge in Mercurial when pulling from the remote repository.

This post is another quick Mercurial merge recipe, but this time for merging a development branch (let’s call it dev) into the default branch.

First things first

Save yourself some heart ache by ensuring there’s nothing left to commit to the default branch before creating the new dev branch. And absolutely do a hg pull from the remote repository beforehand! Personal experience…

Branch away

So you finally created the branch:

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hg branch dev

And happily started deving. Some 9,000 hours later, the new branch is squeaky clean and you want to merge it into default. Same as before, make sure there’s nothing left to commit in dev. Check this with hg status.

The actual merge

Switch back to the default branch:

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hg up default

Do the merge and commit:

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hg merge dev
hg ci -m "merge with branch dev"

Close the branch

If you think there’s no need to keep the dev branch open any longer, you can close it:

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hg up dev
hg ci -m "close branch dev" --close-branch