[RFC] Amend commit messages

Martin Geisler mg at aragost.com
Wed Feb 23 06:18:19 CST 2011


Laurens Holst <laurens.nospam at grauw.nl> writes:

> I don’t think it’s necessary, or desirable.
>
> It doesn’t happen that often, and when it does, usually you still have
> the opportunity to do hg rollback or even to edit it with MQ or
> histedit as you said.
>
> If you’ve pushed out the changes already, then zut, so be it.
> Honestly, it’s really not a big deal to have a less-than-perfect
> commit message. Can’t change commit messages at all with SVN once
> you’ve committed, I think with the existing possibilities Mercurial is
> already a lot more powerful than that.

You can actually change these so-called revision properties with
Subversion, but it requires that the server has been configured to allow
it. First you enable the rev-prop-change hook

  $ ln -s /bin/true <repo>/hooks/pre-revprop-change

and then you can change things like the author:

  $ svn propset --revprop -r HEAD svn:author "alice"

Voila, mutable history in SVN!

> Taking it further seems to me like taking it too far, and hurting the
> immutable history principle. In fact, the ability to edit history
> already leads me to the tendency spend a lot of time on tidying it up
> that I really shouldn’t be spending, and is also actually pretty
> dangerous, you can lose your changes with relative ease. (Hopefully
> with the dead branches functionality it’ll be less dangerous.)

It is still immutable in the sense that you don't mess with the existing
history -- you only add an overlay.

-- 
Martin Geisler

aragost Trifork
Professional Mercurial support
http://aragost.com/en/services/mercurial/blog/


More information about the Mercurial-devel mailing list