annotate en/ch05-daily.xml @ 724:cfdb601a3c8b

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<chapter id="chap.daily">
  <?dbhtml filename="mercurial-in-daily-use.html"?>
  <title>Mercurial in daily use</title>

  <sect1>
    <title>Telling Mercurial which files to track</title>

    <para>Mercurial does not work with files in your repository unless
      you tell it to manage them.  The <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	status</command> command will tell you which files Mercurial
      doesn't know about; it uses a
      <quote><literal>?</literal></quote> to display such
      files.</para>

    <para>To tell Mercurial to track a file, use the <command
	role="hg-cmd">hg add</command> command.  Once you have added a
      file, the entry in the output of <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	status</command> for that file changes from
      <quote><literal>?</literal></quote> to
      <quote><literal>A</literal></quote>.</para>

      &interaction.daily.files.add;

    <para>After you run a <command role="hg-cmd">hg commit</command>,
      the files that you added before the commit will no longer be
      listed in the output of <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	status</command>.  The reason for this is that <command
	role="hg-cmd">hg status</command> only tells you about
      <quote>interesting</quote> files&emdash;those that you have
      modified or told Mercurial to do something with&emdash;by
      default.  If you have a repository that contains thousands of
      files, you will rarely want to know about files that Mercurial
      is tracking, but that have not changed.  (You can still get this
      information; we'll return to this later.)</para>

    <para>Once you add a file, Mercurial doesn't do anything with it
      immediately.  Instead, it will take a snapshot of the file's
      state the next time you perform a commit.  It will then continue
      to track the changes you make to the file every time you commit,
      until you remove the file.</para>

    <sect2>
      <title>Explicit versus implicit file naming</title>

      <para>A useful behaviour that Mercurial has is that if you pass
	the name of a directory to a command, every Mercurial command
	will treat this as <quote>I want to operate on every file in
	  this directory and its subdirectories</quote>.</para>

      &interaction.daily.files.add-dir;

      <para>Notice in this example that Mercurial printed the names of
	the files it added, whereas it didn't do so when we added the
	file named <filename>a</filename> in the earlier
	example.</para>

      <para>What's going on is that in the former case, we explicitly
	named the file to add on the command line, so the assumption
	that Mercurial makes in such cases is that you know what you
	were doing, and it doesn't print any output.</para>

      <para>However, when we <emphasis>imply</emphasis> the names of
	files by giving the name of a directory, Mercurial takes the
	extra step of printing the name of each file that it does
	something with.  This makes it more clear what is happening,
	and reduces the likelihood of a silent and nasty surprise.
	This behaviour is common to most Mercurial commands.</para>

    </sect2>
    <sect2>
      <title>Aside: Mercurial tracks files, not directories</title>

      <para>Mercurial does not track directory information.  Instead,
	it tracks the path to a file.  Before creating a file, it
	first creates any missing directory components of the path.
	After it deletes a file, it then deletes any empty directories
	that were in the deleted file's path.  This sounds like a
	trivial distinction, but it has one minor practical
	consequence: it is not possible to represent a completely
	empty directory in Mercurial.</para>

      <para>Empty directories are rarely useful, and there are
	unintrusive workarounds that you can use to achieve an
	appropriate effect.  The developers of Mercurial thus felt
	that the complexity that would be required to manage empty
	directories was not worth the limited benefit this feature
	would bring.</para>

      <para>If you need an empty directory in your repository, there
	are a few ways to achieve this. One is to create a directory,
	then <command role="hg-cmd">hg add</command> a
	<quote>hidden</quote> file to that directory.  On Unix-like
	systems, any file name that begins with a period
	(<quote><literal>.</literal></quote>) is treated as hidden by
	most commands and GUI tools.  This approach is illustrated
	below.</para>

&interaction.daily.files.hidden;

      <para>Another way to tackle a need for an empty directory is to
	simply create one in your automated build scripts before they
	will need it.</para>

    </sect2>
  </sect1>
  <sect1>
    <title>How to stop tracking a file</title>

    <para>Once you decide that a file no longer belongs in your
      repository, use the <command role="hg-cmd">hg remove</command>
      command; this deletes the file, and tells Mercurial to stop
      tracking it.  A removed file is represented in the output of
      <command role="hg-cmd">hg status</command> with a
      <quote><literal>R</literal></quote>.</para>

    &interaction.daily.files.remove;

    <para>After you <command role="hg-cmd">hg remove</command> a file,
      Mercurial will no longer track changes to that file, even if you
      recreate a file with the same name in your working directory.
      If you do recreate a file with the same name and want Mercurial
      to track the new file, simply <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	add</command> it. Mercurial will know that the newly added
      file is not related to the old file of the same name.</para>

    <sect2>
      <title>Removing a file does not affect its history</title>

      <para>It is important to understand that removing a file has
	only two effects.</para>
      <itemizedlist>
	<listitem><para>It removes the current version of the file
	    from the working directory.</para>
	</listitem>
	<listitem><para>It stops Mercurial from tracking changes to
	    the file, from the time of the next commit.</para>
	</listitem></itemizedlist>
      <para>Removing a file <emphasis>does not</emphasis> in any way
	alter the <emphasis>history</emphasis> of the file.</para>

      <para>If you update the working directory to a changeset in
	which a file that you have removed was still tracked, it will
	reappear in the working directory, with the contents it had
	when you committed that changeset.  If you then update the
	working directory to a later changeset, in which the file had
	been removed, Mercurial will once again remove the file from
	the working directory.</para>

    </sect2>
    <sect2>
      <title>Missing files</title>

      <para>Mercurial considers a file that you have deleted, but not
	used <command role="hg-cmd">hg remove</command> to delete, to
	be <emphasis>missing</emphasis>.  A missing file is
	represented with <quote><literal>!</literal></quote> in the
	output of <command role="hg-cmd">hg status</command>.
	Mercurial commands will not generally do anything with missing
	files.</para>

      &interaction.daily.files.missing;

      <para>If your repository contains a file that <command
	  role="hg-cmd">hg status</command> reports as missing, and
	you want the file to stay gone, you can run <command
	  role="hg-cmd">hg remove <option
	    role="hg-opt-remove">--after</option></command> at any
	time later on, to tell Mercurial that you really did mean to
	remove the file.</para>

      &interaction.daily.files.remove-after;

      <para>On the other hand, if you deleted the missing file by
	accident, give <command role="hg-cmd">hg revert</command> the
	name of the file to recover.  It will reappear, in unmodified
	form.</para>

&interaction.daily.files.recover-missing;

    </sect2>
    <sect2>
      <title>Aside: why tell Mercurial explicitly to remove a
	file?</title>

      <para>You might wonder why Mercurial requires you to explicitly
	tell it that you are deleting a file.  Early during the
	development of Mercurial, it let you delete a file however you
	pleased; Mercurial would notice the absence of the file
	automatically when you next ran a <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	  commit</command>, and stop tracking the file.  In practice,
	this made it too easy to accidentally remove a file without
	noticing.</para>

    </sect2>
    <sect2>
      <title>Useful shorthand&emdash;adding and removing files in one
	step</title>

      <para>Mercurial offers a combination command, <command
	  role="hg-cmd">hg addremove</command>, that adds untracked
	files and marks missing files as removed.</para>

      &interaction.daily.files.addremove;

      <para>The <command role="hg-cmd">hg commit</command> command
	also provides a <option role="hg-opt-commit">-A</option>
	option that performs this same add-and-remove, immediately
	followed by a commit.</para>

      &interaction.daily.files.commit-addremove;

    </sect2>
  </sect1>
  <sect1>
    <title>Copying files</title>

    <para>Mercurial provides a <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	copy</command> command that lets you make a new copy of a
      file.  When you copy a file using this command, Mercurial makes
      a record of the fact that the new file is a copy of the original
      file.  It treats these copied files specially when you merge
      your work with someone else's.</para>

    <sect2>
      <title>The results of copying during a merge</title>

      <para>What happens during a merge is that changes
	<quote>follow</quote> a copy.  To best illustrate what this
	means, let's create an example.  We'll start with the usual
	tiny repository that contains a single file.</para>

      &interaction.daily.copy.init;

      <para>We need to do some work in
	parallel, so that we'll have something to merge.  So let's
	clone our repository.</para>

      &interaction.daily.copy.clone;

      <para>Back in our initial repository, let's use the <command
	  role="hg-cmd">hg copy</command> command to make a copy of
	the first file we created.</para>

      &interaction.daily.copy.copy;

      <para>If we look at the output of the <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	  status</command> command afterwards, the copied file looks
	just like a normal added file.</para>

      &interaction.daily.copy.status;

      <para>But if we pass the <option
	  role="hg-opt-status">-C</option> option to <command
	  role="hg-cmd">hg status</command>, it prints another line of
	output: this is the file that our newly-added file was copied
	<emphasis>from</emphasis>.</para>

      &interaction.daily.copy.status-copy;

      <para>Now, back in the repository we cloned, let's make a change
	in parallel.  We'll add a line of content to the original file
	that we created.</para>

      &interaction.daily.copy.other;

      <para>Now we have a modified <filename>file</filename> in this
	repository.  When we pull the changes from the first
	repository, and merge the two heads, Mercurial will propagate
	the changes that we made locally to <filename>file</filename>
	into its copy, <filename>new-file</filename>.</para>

      &interaction.daily.copy.merge;

    </sect2>
    <sect2 id="sec.daily.why-copy">
      <title>Why should changes follow copies?</title>

      <para>This behaviour, of changes to a file propagating out to
	copies of the file, might seem esoteric, but in most cases
	it's highly desirable.</para>

      <para>First of all, remember that this propagation
	<emphasis>only</emphasis> happens when you merge.  So if you
	<command role="hg-cmd">hg copy</command> a file, and
	subsequently modify the original file during the normal course
	of your work, nothing will happen.</para>

      <para>The second thing to know is that modifications will only
	propagate across a copy as long as the repository that you're
	pulling changes from <emphasis>doesn't know</emphasis> about
	the copy.</para>

      <para>The reason that Mercurial does this is as follows.  Let's
	say I make an important bug fix in a source file, and commit
	my changes. Meanwhile, you've decided to <command
	  role="hg-cmd">hg copy</command> the file in your repository,
	without knowing about the bug or having seen the fix, and you
	have started hacking on your copy of the file.</para>

      <para>If you pulled and merged my changes, and Mercurial
	<emphasis>didn't</emphasis> propagate changes across copies,
	your source file would now contain the bug, and unless you
	remembered to propagate the bug fix by hand, the bug would
	<emphasis>remain</emphasis> in your copy of the file.</para>

      <para>By automatically propagating the change that fixed the bug
	from the original file to the copy, Mercurial prevents this
	class of problem. To my knowledge, Mercurial is the
	<emphasis>only</emphasis> revision control system that
	propagates changes across copies like this.</para>

      <para>Once your change history has a record that the copy and
	subsequent merge occurred, there's usually no further need to
	propagate changes from the original file to the copied file,
	and that's why Mercurial only propagates changes across copies
	until this point, and no further.</para>

    </sect2>
    <sect2>
      <title>How to make changes <emphasis>not</emphasis> follow a
	copy</title>

      <para>If, for some reason, you decide that this business of
	automatically propagating changes across copies is not for
	you, simply use your system's normal file copy command (on
	Unix-like systems, that's <command>cp</command>) to make a
	copy of a file, then <command role="hg-cmd">hg add</command>
	the new copy by hand.  Before you do so, though, please do
	reread section <xref linkend="sec.daily.why-copy"/>, and make
	an informed
	decision that this behaviour is not appropriate to your
	specific case.</para>

    </sect2>
    <sect2>
      <title>Behaviour of the <command role="hg-cmd">hg copy</command>
	command</title>

      <para>When you use the <command role="hg-cmd">hg copy</command>
	command, Mercurial makes a copy of each source file as it
	currently stands in the working directory.  This means that if
	you make some modifications to a file, then <command
	  role="hg-cmd">hg copy</command> it without first having
	committed those changes, the new copy will also contain the
	modifications you have made up until that point.  (I find this
	behaviour a little counterintuitive, which is why I mention it
	here.)</para>

      <para>The <command role="hg-cmd">hg copy</command> command acts
	similarly to the Unix <command>cp</command> command (you can
	use the <command role="hg-cmd">hg cp</command> alias if you
	prefer).  The last argument is the
	<emphasis>destination</emphasis>, and all prior arguments are
	<emphasis>sources</emphasis>.  If you pass it a single file as
	the source, and the destination does not exist, it creates a
	new file with that name.</para>

      &interaction.daily.copy.simple;
      
      <para>If the destination is a directory, Mercurial copies its
	sources into that directory.</para>

      &interaction.daily.copy.dir-dest;

      <para>Copying a directory is
	recursive, and preserves the directory structure of the
	source.</para>

      &interaction.daily.copy.dir-src;

      <para>If the source and destination are both directories, the
	source tree is recreated in the destination directory.</para>

	&interaction.daily.copy.dir-src-dest;

      <para>As with the <command role="hg-cmd">hg rename</command>
	command, if you copy a file manually and then want Mercurial
	to know that you've copied the file, simply use the <option
	  role="hg-opt-copy">--after</option> option to <command
	  role="hg-cmd">hg copy</command>.</para>

      &interaction.daily.copy.after;

    </sect2>
  </sect1>
  <sect1>
    <title>Renaming files</title>

    <para>It's rather more common to need to rename a file than to
      make a copy of it.  The reason I discussed the <command
	role="hg-cmd">hg copy</command> command before talking about
      renaming files is that Mercurial treats a rename in essentially
      the same way as a copy.  Therefore, knowing what Mercurial does
      when you copy a file tells you what to expect when you rename a
      file.</para>

    <para>When you use the <command role="hg-cmd">hg rename</command>
      command, Mercurial makes a copy of each source file, then
      deletes it and marks the file as removed.</para>

      &interaction.daily.rename.rename;

    <para>The <command role="hg-cmd">hg status</command> command shows
      the newly copied file as added, and the copied-from file as
      removed.</para>

    &interaction.daily.rename.status;

    <para>As with the results of a <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	copy</command>, we must use the <option
	role="hg-opt-status">-C</option> option to <command
	role="hg-cmd">hg status</command> to see that the added file
      is really being tracked by Mercurial as a copy of the original,
      now removed, file.</para>

    &interaction.daily.rename.status-copy;

    <para>As with <command role="hg-cmd">hg remove</command> and
      <command role="hg-cmd">hg copy</command>, you can tell Mercurial
      about a rename after the fact using the <option
	role="hg-opt-rename">--after</option> option.  In most other
      respects, the behaviour of the <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	rename</command> command, and the options it accepts, are
      similar to the <command role="hg-cmd">hg copy</command>
      command.</para>

    <sect2>
      <title>Renaming files and merging changes</title>

      <para>Since Mercurial's rename is implemented as
	copy-and-remove, the same propagation of changes happens when
	you merge after a rename as after a copy.</para>

      <para>If I modify a file, and you rename it to a new name, and
	then we merge our respective changes, my modifications to the
	file under its original name will be propagated into the file
	under its new name. (This is something you might expect to
	<quote>simply work,</quote> but not all revision control
	systems actually do this.)</para>

      <para>Whereas having changes follow a copy is a feature where
	you can perhaps nod and say <quote>yes, that might be
	  useful,</quote> it should be clear that having them follow a
	rename is definitely important.  Without this facility, it
	would simply be too easy for changes to become orphaned when
	files are renamed.</para>

    </sect2>
    <sect2>
      <title>Divergent renames and merging</title>

      <para>The case of diverging names occurs when two developers
	start with a file&emdash;let's call it
	<filename>foo</filename>&emdash;in their respective
	repositories.</para>

      &interaction.rename.divergent.clone;

      <para>Anne renames the file to <filename>bar</filename>.</para>

      &interaction.rename.divergent.rename.anne;

      <para>Meanwhile, Bob renames it to
	<filename>quux</filename>.</para>

	&interaction.rename.divergent.rename.bob;

      <para>I like to think of this as a conflict because each
	developer has expressed different intentions about what the
	file ought to be named.</para>

      <para>What do you think should happen when they merge their
	work? Mercurial's actual behaviour is that it always preserves
	<emphasis>both</emphasis> names when it merges changesets that
	contain divergent renames.</para>

      &interaction.rename.divergent.merge;

      <para>Notice that Mercurial does warn about the divergent
	renames, but it leaves it up to you to do something about the
	divergence after the merge.</para>

    </sect2>
    <sect2>
      <title>Convergent renames and merging</title>

      <para>Another kind of rename conflict occurs when two people
	choose to rename different <emphasis>source</emphasis> files
	to the same <emphasis>destination</emphasis>. In this case,
	Mercurial runs its normal merge machinery, and lets you guide
	it to a suitable resolution.</para>

    </sect2>
    <sect2>
      <title>Other name-related corner cases</title>

      <para>Mercurial has a longstanding bug in which it fails to
	handle a merge where one side has a file with a given name,
	while another has a directory with the same name.  This is
	documented as <ulink role="hg-bug"
	  url="http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/bts/issue29">issue
	  29</ulink>.</para>

      &interaction.issue29.go;

    </sect2>
  </sect1>
  <sect1>
    <title>Recovering from mistakes</title>

    <para>Mercurial has some useful commands that will help you to
      recover from some common mistakes.</para>

    <para>The <command role="hg-cmd">hg revert</command> command lets
      you undo changes that you have made to your working directory.
      For example, if you <command role="hg-cmd">hg add</command> a
      file by accident, just run <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	revert</command> with the name of the file you added, and
      while the file won't be touched in any way, it won't be tracked
      for adding by Mercurial any longer, either.  You can also use
      <command role="hg-cmd">hg revert</command> to get rid of
      erroneous changes to a file.</para>

    <para>It's useful to remember that the <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	revert</command> command is useful for changes that you have
      not yet committed.  Once you've committed a change, if you
      decide it was a mistake, you can still do something about it,
      though your options may be more limited.</para>

    <para>For more information about the <command role="hg-cmd">hg
	revert</command> command, and details about how to deal with
      changes you have already committed, see chapter <xref
	linkend="chap.undo"/>.</para>

  </sect1>
</chapter>

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