Tutorial - sharing a change with another person

In TutorialShareChange, we learned how to propagate a ChangeSet from one repository to another.

["Mercurial"] provides several ways of sharing changes between people, but one of the most common is through email.

After we have ["Commit"]ted a change, we can ["Export"] it to a file, and email the file as an attachment to someone else.

To ["Export"] a change, we use the export command. We must provide a ["Tag"], RevisionNumber or ChangeSetID to tell ["Mercurial"] what to ["Export"]. In our case, we want to ["Export"] the ["Tip"]. By default, ["Export"] just displays the patch, so we redirect the output to a file.

At this point, we should still be in the my-hello-share directory.

 $ hg export tip > /tmp/my-patch
  $ cat /tmp/my-patch
  # HG changeset patch
  # User bos@camp4.serpentine.com
  # Node ID da99cce05957f7a62b74d345fd55365dc33109f0
  # Parent  bd2fb7137c85cd5e6b04db4c72a45699e0d90ea9

  Express great joy at existence of Mercurial

  diff -r bd2fb7137c85 -r da99cce05957 hello.c
  --- a/hello.c   Wed Jun 29 19:04:20 2005
  +++ b/hello.c   Wed Jun 29 19:58:37 2005
  @@ -12,5 +12,6 @@
   int main(int argc, char **argv)
   {
       printf("hello, world!\n");
  +    printf("sure am glad I'm using Mercurial!\n");
       return 0;
   }

This file is a PatchFile in UnifiedDiff format, with some extra information that tells ["Mercurial"] how to ["Import"] it.

When the recipient receives our email, they will save the attachment and use the import command to ["Import"] the ChangeSet into their ["Repository"]. (As of version 0.6c, ["Mercurial"] ignores some of this information on import making imports that involve merges problematic.)

Let's put ourselves in the position of that recipient, and learn how to ["Merge"] a change, in TutorialMerge.