Manual Checkout

Emulating a checkout to repair various issues

1. Why would I want to manually checkout a revision?

Sometimes it may be necessary to bypass Mercurial's consistency checks to fix certain problems:

• fixing case collisions on Windows
• changing non-portable file names (eg 'con' or 'aux' on Windows)
• subrepository revisions that are no longer available
• recovering data from damaged repositories

2. Performing a manual checkout

If you are cloning a repository, first start by using the -U flag to avoid the initial checkout:

$ hg clone -U http://myproject/

Next, use the revert command to retrieve all the files from a given revision. Use one or more -X options to exclude problem files.

$ hg revert -a -r <some rev> -X badfile -X baddir

Next, manually set the parent of the working copy:

$ hg debugrebuildstate -r <rev>

Now Mercurial should be in a state where the target revisions is checked out except the problem files. Double-check against summary and status:

$ hg summary
parent: 15782:cde35835b333 
 blah blah blah
branch: default
commit: 7 missing (clean)
update: (current)
$ hg status
! badfile
! baddir/a
! baddir/A

Now you can manually repair or recreate those files, possibly with hg revert -r <goodrev> badfile. When your working directory is in a consistent state, you can commit.

CategoryHowTo