Consequences of using graft in Mercurial

Question

There've been several questions recently about skipping changes when maintaining release branches in Mercurial. For example:

• Mercurial: Branch specific changes keep coming back after dummy merge
• Why are Mercurial backouts in one branch affecting other branches?

Since it was introduced in 2.0, I've wondered about using graft to avoid this problem. Given a revision tree like this:

A---B---C---D---E---F---G---H---I---J

Suppose we need to create a release branch that skips the Evil change E.

hg update -r D
hg graft "F::J"

giving us:

A---B---C---D---E---F---G---H---I---J
             \
              --F'--G'--H'--I'--J'

• Q1: What just happened here? I can understand that transplant would have generated patches out of F::J, and then applied them onto D, but graft is said to use the 3-way merge rather than patches. So....... how does that work? Why is it better?

Lets say I now fix E, and merge that into my release branch.

                  --E2-----------------
                 /                     \
A---B---C---D---E---F---G---H---I---J---M1
             \                            \
              --F'--G'--H'--I'--J'---------M2--

M1 is a straight merge; nothing special there. M2 is merging branches which have "the same" (or at least equivalent) changes on.

• Q2: Is this merge just a normal 3-way merge using D, J' and M1?
• Q3: Has mercurial stored/used extra information about the graft operation to help it with the merge?

And finally...

• Q4: What are the potential problems with a flow like this?

Answer 1

Q1: It helps when there are conflicts. You can use your usual merge tool then (for me it's inline conflict markers, which I edit with Emacs' smerge-mode).

Q2: It's a normal merge.

Q3: No.

Q4: I think it's ugly to have two almost identical branches.

Answer 2

When you update to D and graft F::J, Mercurial runs a number of merges. It will start with this merge:

M = three_way_merge(local=D, other=F, base=E)

If we write +d for the delta between the states C and D, then we start with:

        +d     +e     +f
---- C ---- D ---- E ---- F ----

Turn the graph 90 degrees clockwise and the above three-way merge looks like this:

    -e  
  .---- D
 /
E
 \
  '---- F
    +f

That is, we pretend that we started with E and applied the opposite of -e to get to D. I think of as the reverse patch of +e. Starting in E we also went to state F with the normal delta +f. There's nothing strange here — we have all the states (D, E, and F) in the repository already. So seen like this, it's clear that we can merge D and F.

Merging is a matter of "completing the diamond". So we find a new state M that is a mix of D and F and where the difference from D to M is similar to +f and the difference from F to M is similar to -e. It looks like this:

    -e     +f'
  .---- D ----.
 /             \
E               M
 \             /
  '---- F ----'
    +f     -e'

The +f delta became +f' and the -e delta became -e'. This is just a normal three-way merge, but the effect is interesting: we've applied F onto D instead of E!

After the merge, the second parent of M to F is dropped:

    -e     +f'
  .---- D ----.
 /             \
E               M
 \
  '---- F
    +f

To reiterate: We have copied the "effect" of F onto D, that is, we have found a delta (+f') that applied to D give the same effect as when +f was applied to E. We can straighten the graph a bit to get:

       +f'
--- D ---- M
     \
      '---- E ---- F
        +e     +f

The result is that F is grafted onto D using the full three-way machinery.

• Q1: What just happened here? So....... how does that work? Why is it better?

  A1: Using merges is better than patches since the merge machinery takes things like renames into account.

• Q2: Is this merge just a normal 3-way merge using D, J' and M1?

  A2: Yes, grafting does not alter the topology of the graph.

• Q3: Has mercurial stored/used extra information about the graft operation to help it with the merge?

  A3: No.

• Q4: What are the potential problems with a flow like this?

  A4: From a merge perspective it should work okay. It will duplicate some history which might be confusing for people.