stymied by default update

[John Turner]

On Tue, 30 Dec 2014 18:02:02 -0500, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2014-12-30 at 17:44 -0500, John Turner wrote:
>> On Tue, 30 Dec 2014 17:37:11 -0500, John Turner <jjturner at energi.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Greetings,
>> >
>> > Still learning the ropes here -
>> > 1) the head commit to my new repo was an add of 655 files
>
> We call this the root. Heads are on the other end of history.

Apologies for the faulty nomenclature, for some reason I had it in my mind  
that head and tip were opposites.  There may have been an extant online  
tutorial I read too quickly.. at any rate 'root' is certainly unambiguous.


> Ignore patterns sole reason for existence is to decide which UNKNOWN
> files are not interesting. Known, tracked files are interesting by
> definition, so we don't ignore them. Every SCM I'm aware of works this
> way.

As a novice, I've already managed to gum up a couple of my repos with the  
'uninteresting' files, so it's been a bit of back-and-forth exercise to  
strain out the wheat from the chaff :) - I only alluded to my ignore setup  
thinking that may somehow be playing a role in this odd situation, but it  
looks to be more of a red herring in light of the null parent reference  
below.

>> As a reference, here is the log (the "-1:000000000000" seems to be  
>> telling
>> me something..):
>> E:\rmat_app>hg log
>> changeset:   3:30cf64386e8d
>> tag:         tip
>> user:        jt
>> date:        Tue Dec 30 17:26:30 2014 -0500
>> summary:     reverting to just ignore of .rpt files
>>
>> changeset:   2:cce500291c6a
>> user:        jt
>> date:        Tue Dec 30 14:58:49 2014 -0500
>> summary:     ignoring anything in reports\base folder
>>
>> changeset:   1:001d10e9ced9
>> parent:      -1:000000000000
>> user:        jt
>> date:        Tue Dec 30 13:45:37 2014 -0500
>> summary:     adding 5 files at repo root
>
> When you did this commit, you had nothing (aka -1 aka 000000 aka null)
> checked out. Perhaps you did:
>
> $ hg init repo2 # empty repo with null checked out
> $ cd b
> $ hg pull path-to-repo1 # push/pull does not affect check-out
>

Ah, I think I see the rookie mistake (for the record, I wasn't working  
with any other repo) --
I've gotten into the (bad?) habit of running:
$ hg update null

.. I suppose for the sake of starting from a clean slate in the working  
directory.

I believe that was the state prior to my adding and committing the 5 files  
for changeset 1.

So the null parent makes sense in that case - but if so, how to 'recover'  
the root changeset which still holds my 655 files?