Hunting the Shmoo

Imagine this scenario. You’ve pushed a large series of commits to your favourite review tool (because you are a believer in the glory of microcommits). The reviewer however has found several problems, and worse, they are spread across all of the commits in your series. How do you fix all the issues with minimal fuss while preserving the commit order?

I mentioned in my previous post a mercurial extension I wrote for making bookmarks easier to manipulate. Since then it has undergone a large overhaul, and I believe it is now stable and intuitive enough to advertise a bit more widely.

Introducing bookbinder

When working with bookmarks (or anonymous heads) I often wanted to operate on the entire series of commits within the feature I was working on. I often found myself digging out revision numbers to find the first commit in a bookmark to do things like rebasing, grafting or diffing. This was annoying. I wanted bookmarks to work more like a git-style branch, that has a definite start as well as an end. And I wanted to be able to easily refer to the set of commits contained within. Enter bookbinder.

This is a continuation of my previous post called The New Mercurial Workflow. It assumes that you have at least read and experimented with it a bit. If you haven’t, stop right now, read it, get set up and try playing around with bookmarks and mozreview a bit.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard something about a new review tool coming to Mozilla and how it will change everything. There’s an even better chance you’ve stumbled across one of gps’ blog posts on how we use mercurial at Mozilla.

With mozreview entering beta, I decided to throw out my old mq based workflow and try to use all the latest and greatest tools. That means mercurial bookmarks, a unified mozilla-central, using mozreview and completely expunging mq from my workflow.

qqver is a Mercurial extension that forces mq to version all patch queues in the same repository. The syntax is the exact same as when doing normal patch queue versioning (i.e ‘hg init –mq’), except the repo is created one directory higher so it is able to track all patch queues. As with stock queue repos, new and existing patches are added automatically.