cannot run histedit, strange message

[Dan Villiom Podlaski Christiansen]

On 7 May 2021, at 17.00, Uwe Brauer <oub at mat.ucm.es> wrote:

> Hi 
> 
> I have a typo in a commit message so I thought to run 
> 
> hg histedit
> 
> However I obtain a message I never saw before 
> abort: cannot edit history that contains merges
> 
> The change set whose message I want to change does not contain a merge,
> but of course in this branch there have been merges, but some changesets
> ago.
> 
> I can run uncommit, but I am wondering about the message honestly.
> 

Without more context, it's hard to tell what's going on; by default, histedit edits the draft ancestors, and one of them might indeed be a merge. However, I'd suggest two things:

1) You can edit specific commits by passing -r/--rev to histedit.
2) You can do more advanced history editing with the the evolve[1] extension. It includes a `metaedit` command that allows specifically editing changeset metadata, including commit message.

[1] https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/EvolveExtension

--

Dan Villiom Podlaski Christiansen
danchr at gmail.com