absorb: preserve changesets which were already empty
Most commands in Mercurial (commit, rebase, absorb itself) don’t create empty
changesets or drop them if they become empty. If there’s a changeset that’s
empty, it must be a deliberate choice of the user. At least it shouldn’t be
absorb’s responsibility to prune them. The fact that changesets that became
empty during absorb are pruned, is unaffected by this.
This case was found while writing patches which make it possible to configure
absorb and rebase to not drop empty changesets. Even without having such config
set, I think it’s valuable to preserve changesets which were already empty.
Initial setup.
$ hg init repo
$ cd repo
$ touch thefile
$ hg ci -A -m 'Initial commit.'
adding thefile
Create a tag.
$ hg tag branchortag
Create a branch with the same name as the tag.
$ hg branch branchortag
marked working directory as branch branchortag
(branches are permanent and global, did you want a bookmark?)
$ hg ci -m 'Create a branch with the same name as a tag.'
This is what we have:
$ hg log
changeset: 2:10519b3f489a
branch: branchortag
tag: tip
user: test
date: Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
summary: Create a branch with the same name as a tag.
changeset: 1:2635c45ca99b
user: test
date: Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
summary: Added tag branchortag for changeset f57387372b5d
changeset: 0:f57387372b5d
tag: branchortag
user: test
date: Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
summary: Initial commit.
Update to the tag:
$ hg up 'tag(branchortag)'
0 files updated, 0 files merged, 1 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ hg parents
changeset: 0:f57387372b5d
tag: branchortag
user: test
date: Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
summary: Initial commit.
Updating to the branch:
$ hg up 'branch(branchortag)'
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ hg parents
changeset: 2:10519b3f489a
branch: branchortag
tag: tip
user: test
date: Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
summary: Create a branch with the same name as a tag.
$ cd ..