view mercurial/help/revisions.txt @ 25018:93e015a3d1ea

commit: add ui.allowemptycommit config option

This adds a config flag that enables a user to make empty commits.
This is useful in a number of cases.

For instance, automation that creates release branches via
bookmarks may want to make empty commits to that release bookmark so that it
can't be fast-forwarded and so it can record information about the release
bookmark's creation. This is already possible with named branches, so making it
possible for bookmarks makes sense.

Another case we've wanted it is for mirroring repositories into Mercurial. We
have automation that syncs commits into hg by running things from the command
line. The ability to produce empty commits is useful for syncing unusual commits
from other VCS's.

In general, allowing the user to create the DAG as they see fit seems useful,
and when I mentioned this in IRC more than one person piped up and said they
were already hacking around this limitation by using mq, import, and
commit-dummy-change-then-amend-the-content-away style solutions.

Mercurial supports several ways to specify individual revisions.

A plain integer is treated as a revision number. Negative integers are
treated as sequential offsets from the tip, with -1 denoting the tip,
-2 denoting the revision prior to the tip, and so forth.

A 40-digit hexadecimal string is treated as a unique revision
identifier.

A hexadecimal string less than 40 characters long is treated as a
unique revision identifier and is referred to as a short-form
identifier. A short-form identifier is only valid if it is the prefix
of exactly one full-length identifier.

Any other string is treated as a bookmark, tag, or branch name. A
bookmark is a movable pointer to a revision. A tag is a permanent name
associated with a revision. A branch name denotes the tipmost open branch head
of that branch - or if they are all closed, the tipmost closed head of the
branch. Bookmark, tag, and branch names must not contain the ":" character.

The reserved name "tip" always identifies the most recent revision.

The reserved name "null" indicates the null revision. This is the
revision of an empty repository, and the parent of revision 0.

The reserved name "." indicates the working directory parent. If no
working directory is checked out, it is equivalent to null. If an
uncommitted merge is in progress, "." is the revision of the first
parent.