========================================

Safe Mutable History

========================================

Here are various Materials on planned improvement to mercurial regarding

rewriting history.

 * The **obsolete marker** concept aims to provide and alternative to ``strip``

   to get ride of changesets.

 * The **evolve** mercurial extension to rewrite history using *obsolete marker*

   under the hood.

The first and most important step is by far the **obsolete marker**. However

most user will never be directly exposed to the concept. For this reason

document about changeset evolution are put first.

Evolve: A robust alternative to MQ

====================================

Evolve is an experimental history rewriting extensions that use obsolete

markers. It is inspired from MQ and pbranch but have multiple advantage over

them:

* Handle **non-linear history with branches and merges**

  Conflict are much rarer and much more user friendly.

  You are do not need to unapply and apply patche to access various part of you

  history.

  Mutable history can be used in all usual operation 'pull, push, log, diff …)

* Allow **sharing and collaboration** mutable history without fear of duplicate.

  (thanks to obsolete marker).

* Cover all mq usage but guard.

.. warning:: The evolve extention and the obsolete marker are at an experimental

            stage. While using obsolet you'll likely be exposed to complexe

            implication of the **obsolete marker** concept. I do not recommend

            non power user to test this at this stage.

            Production ready version should hide such details to normal user.

To enable the evolve extension use::

    $ hg clone http://hg-dev.octopoid.net/hgwebdir.cgi/mutable-history/

    $ mutable-history/enable.sh >> ~/.hgrc

    $ hg clone http://hg-dev.octopoid.net/hgwebdir.cgi/hgview/

    $ cd hgview

    $ python setup.py install --user

 ---

.. toctree::

   :maxdepth: 2

   tutorial

   evolve-faq

   from-mq

   evolve-collaboration

   qsync

Smart changeset deletion: Obsolete Marker

==========================================

Obsolete marker is a powerful concept that allow mercurial to safely handle

history rewriting operations. It is a new type of relation between Mercurial

changesets that track the result of history rewriting operations.

This concept is simple to define and provides a very solid base to:

- Very fast history rewriting operations,

- auditable and reversible history rewritting process,

- clean final history,

- share and collaborate on mutable part of the history,

- gracefully handle history rewriting conflict,

- allows various history rewriting UI to collaborate with a underlying common API.

 ---

For more information see documents below

.. toctree::

   :maxdepth: 2

   obs-concept

   obs-implementation

=================================

Here is a list of know issue that will be fixed later:

* ``hg update`` can move an obsolete parent

* hg merge considered extinct head as valid target. requiring you to manually

  specify target all the time.

* obsolete relation exchange crash (as in traceback) on static http repo.

Annexe

=================================

.. toctree::

   :maxdepth: 1

   glossary