How to remove certain changesets from a specific Mercurial clone?

Question

I have a clone of a central repo at rev 2048. I want to remove the last 10 changesets on my local repo as if I was back in time two weeks ago. I suppose I could delete my local repo and do "hg clone -rev 2038" but that would be long (cloning the repo takes several minutes). Is there a way to just "unpull" some changesets?

Notes:

• I'm not trying to backout the changesets. I'll eventually pull those changesets again from the central repo.
• I'm not trying to update the working directory to an earlier version; I really want to affect the repository.
• I don't have any outgoing changesets or pending modifications in my current repo and working directory.

Solution 1

Use the strip command:

hg strip -r 2039

This command is provided by the StripExtension. It is distributed as part of Mercurial 2.8 and later, but you do need to enable it first by adding the following lines to your .hgrc or Mercurial.ini:

[extensions]
strip =

Before Mercurial 2.8, it was part of the MqExtension.

To prevent you from accidentally destroying history, the command will generate a backup bundle in .hg/strip-backup/ which you can hg unbundle again if desired.

Solution 2

Cloning your local repo should be fast. I assume "several minutes" refers to a remote repo?

You can use hg clone <local repo> <new repo> -r <revision> to only clone up to a certain revision.

Solution 3

To remove a changeset that was already committed and pushed use :

 hg backout -r (changeset number)

To remove a changeset that was committed but not pushed use :

  hg strip -r (changeset number)

Solution 4

For versions previous to Mercurial 2.8, the Strip was part of the MqExtension.
In case you need to Enable the old MQ Extensions, you can do it by adding this:

[extensions]

hgext.mq =

to your ~/.hgrc (or mercurial.ini) file.

The Strip information used to be here but now it can be found here.

View more solutions

Comments

[anton.burger]

+1; although I think Martinho's comment is the "answer" in this case (why bother "unpulling" if you want the changesets down the line anyway?), it's important to stress that cloning from the local repo is both possible and gives exactly the same results in less time. After cloning from local, update the [paths] in .hg/hgrc to point to remote again.

[Sylvain]

Cloning from the local repo is indeed much faster. Thanks

[schlamar]

Please note that strip should only be used on unpublished changesets.

[Queequeg]

Can also do: hg strip <rev 1> <rev 2> .... -r is optional and multi revs can be removed.

[Sylvain]

@schlamar, strip should not be used on published changesets on the master repository, that is true. However, there is no problem if you strip published changesets on your own clone even if they come from the master repo, on you next pull they will come back.