Mercurial commit message cleaning

Now the midterm is over, one can already think about to make my code ready to be pushed to the official Savannah repository of GNU/Octave. So on the maintainers-mailing list there was a discussion about how to make my changesets fit for the official repository.

Again thanks to Jordi I really learned a lot, how to "manipulate" the Mercurial history. As a first step one should get Mercurial 2.7, because older versions might not support all features used in this post. The current version from the Debian repository does not suffice.

A good point to start is getting a list of all my changesets:

  hg log --user k.ohlhus

Now my first change in current development is, that I no longer want to merge the Savannah repository into mine. Instead I got to know about the rebase command from Mercurial, which sets all your nonofficial changesets on top of the history, that makes it easier to track what has changed in my repository.

The old state of my repository is very good explained in Scenario B of the rebase manual page. To fix that I had to run a mix of two commands for all my merges, e.g.:

  hg phase --draft MERGE_CHANGESET --force
  hg rebase --source MERGE_CHANGESET --dest LAST_CHANGESET_FROM_SAVANNAH
  

From now all my changes are on top. The second task of cleaning is to tidy up my commit messages, as I did not stick to the commit message guidelines of Octave. By typing

  hg histedit -r LAST_BAD_CHANGESET_OF_MINE

I can create an edit plan for my changeset commit messages and carry this plan out.

---

edit plan example:

---

mess a623d25a6b42 17121 Startet fixing the transposition problem with all ILU. S

pick 466fb4342423 17122 Interface change in itsol_util.h and further addition of

pick 5afd5d5f42d0 17123 Added MATLAB compatibility wrapper for ILU-factorization

pick 0dbc3caefb6e 17124 Integrating ZITSOL-library to Octave build system.

pick e0b86073ce45 17125 Extended ILU-Preconditioner for complex input using ZITS

pick 9436002c0a0b 17126 Updated test cases. Fixing ILUC output.

pick 9d4e24a01f42 17127 Test cases for complex case increased.

pick 1b6ac1f0991b 17128 Test cases for complex case in ilut.

pick 286aa419eb58 17129 Redirected output of ITSOL and ZITSOL from stderr to tem

pick 975f30ec1c1b 17130 Make most recent development on ILUTP public. Still not

pick 65c0db01a558 17131 Final tidy up on Matlab wrapper with tests.

pick 4244faff69d6 17132 Moved ilu.m from scripts/linear-algebra to scripts/spars

pick 31a15f423dd8 17133 removed and new build entries.

# Edit history between a623d25a6b42 and 31a15f423dd8

#

# Commands:

#  p, pick = use commit

#  e, edit = use commit, but stop for amending

#  f, fold = use commit, but fold into previous commit (combines N and N-1)

#  d, drop = remove commit from history

#  m, mess = edit message without changing commit content

#

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This tedious, but necessary work has to find its way to my development repository after my journey (13th of August). Then I'll provide instructions how to get  the new changesets and how to remove the older ones. In any case I'm sorry for the inconvenience.