Closing Hg Branches

Question

When using hg branch FeatureBranchName and posting it to a central repo shared by developers, is there a way to close FeatureBranchName when its development has been officially merged with the default branch?

It would also be useful if FeatureBranchName not displayed when running the hg branches command.

Answer 1

 hg commit --close-branch 

should be enough to mark the branch closing. (see hg commit )

 --close-branch 

mark the branch closed by hiding it from the list of branches.

See also this thread :

My expectation is that I am closing the branch because this line of development is at an impasse and I no longer want to bother her.
Therefore, when a branch is closed, I should not see it (for example, in branches, heads, logs), unless I explicitly ask to see closed branches.

I should note that I expect the private branch to remain in the repository; this may be useful in the future, and the commit --close-branch message should at least explain why the branch was closed.
Pruning branches is a completely different thing.

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Note: the "closing branch" business is one aspect missing from Git compared to Mercurial :

, you always said ephemeral things that you need to use and throw away, and as far as I know, git has no way to tell your colleagues what you did to the branch;
the only way to do this is to delete it or hope that he sees the final merge and realizes that the branch is closed for further development.

[In Mercurial] However, if you made a branch, you cannot delete it from the repository; instead, you issue a commit that closes the branch, and Mercurial notes that the branch is closed. Itll remain a constant part of the history of your repository.

Answer 2

I wrote a simple script that completes closing a branch, the commands found in PruningDeadBranches .

## script ##

 #!/bin/bash #script to close not required branch in mercurial hg up -C $1 if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "$1 is up" else echo "branch not found, please recheck your argument" exit 1 fi echo "$1 is up" hg commit --close-branch -m 'this branch no longer required' echo "$1 is closed" hg up -C default echo "default is up" 

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how

Navigate to the local copy of the repository and run this script by providing an argument. For example:

 $./the_script_above.sh bad_branch_name_to_close 

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What is he doing

This does the following:

• If a branch exists, it is updated to this branch or exists with an error message.
• He closes the branch.
• Default branch updates.
• Stop.