Mercurial Branches

This page documents how to use Mercurial, rather than Subversion, to hack on Django.

Core developers

For people who are core committers, and want to use Mercurial rather than Subversion as their client:

1. Install the ​hgsubversion extension (and understand basically how it works).
2. Clone the Subversion repository (do this using hg version 1.5 or higher, or else the changeset hashes generated by hgsubversion will be incompatible with those from repos generated using newer hg versions, including the ​official Django hg mirror).:

   hg clone svn+http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/ django
   

   This will take a Good While (lots of hours), and in some cases can take a Very Long Time for just one changeset (I gave up on r11505).
   ALTERNATIVELY:
   1. Clone the ​official Django hg mirror in the normal way, using hg 1.5 or greater.
   2. Edit .hg/hgrc to say:

      default = svn+http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/
      

   3. Do hg svn rebuildmeta. This works because the official Django mirror was been created by hgsubversion, and is updated only by hgsubversion.

3. Use normal hg commands to make commits, switch branches, push back to the subversion repository etc. Remember to use hg rebase --svn, and not hg merge.

Tips

• Use the ​bookmarks extension for git-style local feature branches.
• Alternatively, use the ​queues extension to manage long lived patches.
• To collapse several commits into a single commit before pushing back to svn, use the ​histedit extension
• To backport a changeset from trunk, use the ​transplant extension