Mercurial Tip: Checking in regularly with uncommitted changes in your clone

NetBeans, like OpenJDK and OpenSolaris, uses the Mercurial distributed version control system. I'm a big fan of of distributed version control. However, one thing that drives me nuts is this error message: % hg merge abort: outstanding uncommitted changes This isn't just going to be a rant - I've finally found a solution which is working extremely well for me. I've suggested it to some other developers who have also reported that it works well for them, so I thought I would share it with you. The reason I run into this all the time is my preferred style of work: I like to work on many things simultaneously. If while working on something, I come across a bug and I spot the problem, I just fix it right there and add a test for it. When I get ideas, I might go and put @todo tasks for myself, or leave editorial comments in various source files. I might also work on a couple of larger tasks simultaneously. Yes, I know the preferred Mercurial idiom for this is to have multiple clones, one for each task - but that isn't my preferred way of doing it. Each NetBeans clone is huge and takes a while to both clone and build - and I would have to switch my IDE editing context between these large source trees all the time. I like to check things in in logical chunks with a message that pertains to that particular change. This means I often check in a subset of the edited files in the tree. I like to check in code regularly ra...

Date: October, 31 2008
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/tor/entry/mercurial_tip_checking_in_regularly

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