Would like to do a mercurial clone with filter of patterns in hgignore

Over time a number of the developers have committed files that were then added to the .hgignore. From what I hear there is no way to remove items from the history of mercurial, which is ok. But I also heard that there is a way to do a cl开发者_JS百科one, I think using the convert plugin, to clone/export a repo while specifying which files to not include in the conversion.

I can't help but think that someone out there has a script that does this export/filter/convert using the patterns from the .hgignore file.

Has anyone created such a beast?

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You could create a filemap from .hgignore doing something like this:

hg clone -U yourrepo temprepo # create a temp repo with no files in working dir
cd tmprepo
hg revert --all # put files in working dir
hg forget **   # un-add the files
hg status --ignored --no-status | sed 's/^/exclude /' > ../filemap

that will get you a filemap you can pass into hg convert that removes all the added files that would be ignored given your .hgignore.

Do understand though, that running convert creates a whole new repo that is unrelated to your previous repo. All existing clones will be unusable with the new one. It's not normally worth it.

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hg convert is indeed the thing you want to use.

You will want to create a file map (just a text file) which will list all of the things you either want to include, exclude, or rename:

include subfolder
exclude subfolder/supersub
etc...

Read the following for a more concrete example:
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ConvertExtension#A--filemap

Once you have created this file you will just use the following command:

$ hg convert --filemap my_file_map /path/to/source/repo /path/to/dest/repo

The source repo will not be modified and a dest repo will be created. I don't want to just copy verbatim what the documentation already says so here is the link:

How to keep just a subdirectory (or run on the mercurial repo):
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ConvertExtension#Converting_from_Mercurial