view doc/README @ 19854:49d4919d21c2

shelve: add a shelve extension to save/restore working changes

This extension saves shelved changes using a temporary draft commit,
and bundles the temporary commit and its draft ancestors, then
strips them.

This strategy makes it possible to use Mercurial's bundle and merge
machinery to resolve conflicts if necessary when unshelving, even
when the destination commit or its ancestors have been amended,
squashed, or evolved. (Once a change has been unshelved, its
associated unbundled commits are either rolled back or stripped.)

Storing the shelved change as a bundle also avoids the difficulty
that hidden commits would cause, of making it impossible to amend
the parent if it is a draft commits (a common scenario).

Although this extension shares its name and some functionality with
the third party hgshelve extension, it has little else in common.
Notably, the hgshelve extension shelves changes as unified diffs,
which makes conflict resolution a matter of finding .rej files and
conflict markers, and cleaning up the mess by hand.

We do not yet allow hunk-level choosing of changes to record.
Compared to the hgshelve extension, this is a small regression in
usability, but we hope to integrate that at a later point, once the
record machinery becomes more reusable and robust.

Mercurial's documentation is kept in reStructuredText format, which is
a simple plain text format that's easy to read and edit:

  http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

It's also convertible to a variety of other formats including standard
UNIX man page format and HTML. You'll need to install Docutils:

  http://docutils.sourceforge.net/

Use the Makefile in this directory to generate the man and HTML pages.