Updating commit timestamp on push.

[Sean Farley]

kannan at cakoose.com writes:

> We use Mercurial in a mostly centralized manner.  We use local commits and
> local branches during but eventually use some kind of history modification
> to collapse things before pushing to the central repo.  We do not have merge
> commits in our central repo.
>
> The problem: when I do "hg log", the commit timestamps are based on the
> timestamp of the original commit.  It would be more useful to us if the
> timestamps represented when each commit made it to the central repo (at
> least within a minute or two).
>
> I'm trying to figure out how to achieve that.  My initial attempt involves
> creating an alias called "amend" that calls "hg commit --amend --date
> <now>".  This works, but requires that we remember to call "hg amend" right
> before each push.  I'm hoping for something more automatic.
>
> For example, it would be nice if I could run a bit of code right before a
> push and, for each commit that is going to be pushed:
> - if it is marked immutable, fail.
> - otherwise, update the timestamp to the current time.
>
> I looked at "pre-push" hooks and also looked at the way the "mq" extension
> creates a wrapper around the "push" command.  Those options aren't
> straightforward because it looks like I need to parse the arguments to
> "push" (like "-b <branch>") to make sure I figure out the right set of
> commits.  I think I can copy/paste some code from the Mercurial source's
> implementation of "push" to achieve my goal, but that seems brittle.
>
> Any advice on what the right approach is?

Wrapping push like this is asking for *all* kinds trouble. Instead, I
would enable blackbox on the server and then use that information in a
custom mercurial extension that would map each commit to the pushed
timestamp. This map can then be pulled by each client via pushkey in
this custom extension.