How to deal with a committer name change in Mercurial

Question

I have a project in Mercurial with a group of commiters. Unfortunately, some of the committers changed their names several times, for example. first it was a “nickname,” and then it became “First Name Last Name,” and then something else.

Most repository analysis tools expect that the committer will have the same name during the project, so ideally I would like to rename the committers of the previous versions into our main repository and force everyone to make a new clone. Is it possible?

Are there any other ways to solve this problem?

Answer 1

Yes it is possible. Use Convert extension and then hg convert from the repository with bad names to the new repository with good names and use authormap. There are many things you can do using the conversion extension and conversion from Mercurial to another Mercurial repo.

Startup file, suppose Eric Hopper <[e-mail]> is the canonical name of the author:

 Eric Hopper <[e-mail]>=Eric Hopper <[e-mail]> Eric M. Hopper <[e-mail]>=Eric Hopper <[e-mail]> Eric Hopper <[e-mail]>=Eric Hopper <[e-mail]> 

Then:

 hg convert -s hg -d hg --authormap authormap badnamesrepo goodnamesrepo 

Note: that when converting hg to an hg repository, many new changesets will not always be created, in this case it will be, and they will be equivalent to (but different from) the changesets to the original repository. This means that everyone using this repository will have to delete all the clones that they have and get new ones.

In the general case, converting an hg repository to an hg repository is likely to create at least a few new sets of changes, otherwise there would be no reason for this. And that will almost certainly require everyone to destroy all their clones and re-clone.

If your analysis tool has the ability to reassign author names, this is probably the best way. But this is not what you asked for, so I gave you the answer you asked. :-)