(see also TipsAndTricks)

Mercurial Frequently Asked Questions

TableOfContents


1. General Questions

1.1. What is the license of the project?

The project is available under the GNU General Public License, v2. See COPYING in the release for more details.

2. Common Problems

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3. Terminology

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4. General Usage

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5. Tags

5.1. How do tags work in Mercurial?

Tags work slightly differently in Mercurial than most revision systems. The design attempts to meet the following requirements:

Thus Mercurial stores tags as a file in the working dir. This file is called .hgtags and consists of a list of changeset IDs and their corresponding tags. To add a tag to the system, simply add a line to this file and then commit it for it to take effect. The hg tag command will do this for you and hg tags will show the currently effective tags.

Note that because tags refer to changeset IDs and the changeset ID is effectively the sum of all the contents of the repository for that change, it is impossible in Mercurial to simultaneously commit and add a tag. Thus tagging a revision must be done as a second step.

5.2. What if I want to just keep local tags?

You can use "hg tag" command with an option -l or --local. This will store the tag in the file .hg/localtags, which will not be distributed or versioned. The format of this file is identical to the one of .hgtags and the tags stored there are handled the same.

5.3. How do tags work with multiple heads?

The tags that are in effect at any given time are the tags specified in each head, with heads closer to the tip taking precedence. Local tags override all other tags.

5.4. What if multiple lines with different revisions use the same tag name in .hgtags?

Only the last line where the tag appears is taken into account. The behavior is identical when this happens in .hg/localtags.

6. Bugs and Features

6.1. I found a bug, what do I do?

Report it to the mercurial mailing list, mercurial@selenic.com or in the bug tracker http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/bts/

6.2. What should I include in my bug report?

Enough information to reproduce or diagnose the bug. If you can, try using the hg -v and hg -d switches to figure out exactly what Mercurial is doing.

If you can reproduce the bug in a simple repository, that is very helpful. The best is to create a simple shell script to automate this process, which can then be added to our test suite.

6.3. Can Mercurial do <x>?

If you'd like to request a feature, send your request to mercurial@selenic.com. As Mercurial is still very new, there are certainly features it is missing and you can give us feedback on how best to implement them.

Be sure to see ToDo and MissingFeatures to see what's already planned and where we need help.

7. Web Interface

Find the URL for the file and then replace the changeset identifier with tip.

7.2. How do I change the style of the web interface to the visually more attractive gitweb?

In [http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hgrc.5.html hgrc] set

[web]
style = gitweb

To switch back to the default style specify "style = default" (see [http://hgbook.red-bean.com/hgbookch6.html#x10-1390006.6.5 hgbook]).

8. Technical Details

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9. Mercurial Book

See ["/MercurialBook"].