avoiding cluttered history?

[Isaac Jurado]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 3:21 PM, Ed Keith <e_d_k at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Sometime I find myself working on problems where the solution is not obvious and I explore lots of dead ends before hitting on the solution. Back in the dark ages I frequently archived my work and only checked the final results into version control. Now rather than archiving, I create a temporary hg repository that I work in then I check the final results into my main repository and publish it.
>
> In the past the official repository has been svn, and I have been quite satisfied with this work flow, but I will soon be working on a project which is officially using hg. There is no reason why this would not continue to work, but somehow it feels suboptimal. It looks like MQ might be better, but I though I'd ask the list before diving into it because it looks like a steep learning curve.

I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve, but I think that you want
to, somehow, "collapse" all the experimental work (probably scattered
among various backup commits) into a single changeset.  In that case
you can just make a patch containing all the changes you want to apply
as one and apply it to the master repo/branch, then drop the
experimental repository.

For me MQ is a bit handier because you can "qfold" and then "qfinish",
but if you haven't played enough with it I advise you towards the
simpler hg diff + patch approach, as you'll have a lower risk of
surprise.

Cheers.

-- 
Isaac Jurado

"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding"
Leonardo da Vinci