Death to "hg update -C"

[Jelle Herold]

On Jul 22, 2009, at 10:58, Hans Meine wrote:

>>> Even if I say '-C', many times I don't mean it.
>>> I suppose I'm not the only one?
>>>
>>> Can this be fixed?
>>
>> No, it cannot be fixed. There are countless users, scripts, and even
>> paper books that know about --clean. It is here forever.
>
> Similar to Greg's suggestion, I would say it could be fixed: Similar  
> to strip,
> one could write a backup (e.g. "hg diff --git" output).  In contrast  
> to Greg,
> I would suggest not to have an option for it, and not to write it  
> into the
> home directory, but simply to write it to a fixed name under the .hg/
> directory (potentially overwriting a previous backup).  This would  
> not lead to
> too much clutter IMO and be similar to the usual rollback data.   
> (Actually, it
> would be perfect if "rollback" was the command to undo update -C.)
>
> Does that make sense?
>
> (Yes, I know there are some technical difficulties due to diffing  
> w.r.t. --git
> format, renames, and potentially other things, but it looks doable  
> to me.)

Right, this is more or less what I had in mind. Maybe mercurial can be  
even smart
about which backups to keep: once a change has been committed into the  
repository
the relevant backup data can go.

I haven't thoughtabout how this would work in detail nor do I know  
enough mercurial
to consider all implications.

Is this feasable? Does Hans' suggestion make sense?

What other options are there? Maybe integration with shelve? .. auto- 
shelve?

Thanks.
Jelle