Pruning a *lot* of dead branches

Sean Russell ser at germane-software.com
Thu Jan 22 12:31:34 UTC 2009


I've tried the suggestions on 
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/PruningDeadBranches, 
which don't really solve my problem adequately.

I have a repo that was converted from SVN; it has 99 heads, almost all 
of which should be closed. 

My first attempt to close them was to update to Mercurial tip and use 
'commit --close-branch'; this succeeded, but created 90 new revisions 
which renders the graph log almost unreadable, and in an attempt to 
collapse these I learned the limits of qimport (which shouldn't have 
surprised me, since no single HG node can have more than two parents).

I next though about merging all of the branches into a single, "dead 
branch" branch which I was then going to close, but realized that this 
was going to get me to the same place.

I can't use strip -- we need the history of the project.

So, my question is: am I stuck with the choice of either having a bunch 
of unclosed heads which makes "heads" useless, or having a big block of 
meaningless (to us, although not to HG) commits which destroys any 
attempt to visually read the merge history?

Thanks,

--- SER



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