Help. I've screwed up my repo again, and I have no idea how.

[Thomas Arendsen Hein]

* Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> [20061102 07:21]:
> Your history looks like this:
> 
> 11                      9
>  \                     /
>  10   0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8
>    \ /
>    empty
>
> You've actually found a bug here, by the way:
> 
> changeset:   10:4d21d59f3206
> user:        landley at driftwood
> date:        Tue Oct 31 23:30:06 2006 -0500
> summary:     Add menuconfig, plus some basic Config info, lots of
> 
> We don't report that the parent is not 9.

Known problem, just waiting for a comment:
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/bts/issue385

> On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 10:00:39PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> >   $ hg commit
> >   Please choose a commit username to be recorded in the changelog via
> >   command line option (-u "First Last <email at example.com>"), in the
> >   configuration files (hgrc), or by setting the EMAIL environment variable.
>
> > Question: Why doesn't the error message above say _HOW_ to add a commit 
> > username to hgrc?  It's not obvious.  Read far enough in the man page and you 
> > find it's key "username" in section "ui", except that says the default is 
> > username at hostname which is apparently no longer the case.
> 
> Because some clever person decided my original terse message was not
> verbose enough.

Being the clever person reacting to wishes of other users here I'd
like to clarify the current situation: "Please specify a username."
is indeed nice and short (one line), but probably not very helpful.

The I-want-to-commit-now-no-time-to-read-docs user gains all
information about what to do: -u "First Last <email at example.com>"
(two lines)

The But-always-using-that-option-is-stupid-user gets a hint that
there is something else he can look for to make this more permanent.
(three lines)

Of course there can be a long page explaining everything about
usernames etc., but an error message is not the right place.
What I want is the next generation help system in which you can do:

$ hg commit
Abort: Please specify a username. (see 'hg help username')
$ hg help username
Explain everything about username

See http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/bts/issue197

Thomas

-- 
Email: thomas at intevation.de
http://intevation.de/~thomas/