cinnabar is the common natural form in which mercury can be found on Earth. It contains mercury sulfide and its powder is used to make the vermillion pigment.
git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. Contrary to other such helpers ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]), it doesn't use a local mercurial clone under the hood.
The main focus at the moment is to make it work with mozilla-central and related mercurial repositories and support Mozilla workflows (try server, etc.).
Repositories last used with versions lower than 0.5.0 are not supported.
Please run git cinnabar upgrade with version 0.5.0 first.
The git-cinnabar source code is distributed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License version 2.0 (see the MPL-2.0 file), with parts (the git-core subdirectory) distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.0 (see the git-core/COPYING file).
As a consequence, git-cinnabar binary executables are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.0.
Assuming a prebuilt binary is available for your system, get the download.py script and run it (requires python 3.6 or newer) with:
$ ./download.py
Add the directory where the download happened to your PATH. If you have another git-remote-hg project in your PATH already, make sure the git-cinnabar path comes before.
Run the following:
$ cargo install git-cinnabar
$ git cinnabar setup
Run the following:
$ git clone https://github.com/glandium/git-cinnabar
$ cd git-cinnabar
$ make
Add the git-cinnabar directory to your PATH.
$ git clone hg::<mercurial repo>
where <mercurial repo> can be a path to a local directory containing a
mercurial repository, or a http, https or ssh url.
Essentially, use git like you would for a git repository, but use a hg:: url
where you would use a git:// url.
See https://github.com/glandium/git-cinnabar/wiki/Mozilla:-A-git-workflow-for-Gecko-development for an example workflow for Mozilla repositories.
Mercurial has two different ways to handle what git would call branches: branches and bookmarks. Mercurial branches are permanent markers on each changeset that belongs to them, and bookmarks are similar to git branches.
You may choose how to interact with those with the cinnabar.refs
configuration. The following values are supported, either individually or
combined in a comma-separated list:
bookmarks: in this mode, the mercurial repository's bookmarks are exposed
as refs/heads/$bookmark. Practically speaking, this means the mercurial
bookmarks appear as the remote git branches.
tips: in this mode, the most recent head of each mercurial branch is
exposed as refs/heads/$branch. Any other head of the same branch is not
exposed. This mode can be useful when branches have no more than one head.
heads: in this mode, the mercurial repository's heads are exposed as
refs/heads/$branch/$head, where $branch is the mercurial branch name
and $head is the full changeset sha1 of that head.
When these values are used in combinations, the branch mappings are varied accordingly to make the type of each remote ref explicit and to avoid name collisions.
When combining bookmarks and heads, bookmarks are exposed as
refs/heads/bookmarks/$bookmark and branch heads are exposed as
refs/heads/branches/$branch/$head (where $head is the full changeset
sha1 of the head).
When combining bookmarks and tips, bookmarks are exposed as
refs/heads/bookmarks/$bookmark and branch tips are exposed as
refs/heads/branches/$branch. Any other heads of the same branch are not
exposed.
When combining all of bookmarks, heads, and tips, bookmarks are
exposed as refs/heads/bookmarks/$bookmark, branch heads are exposed as
refs/heads/branches/$branch/$head (where $head is the full changeset
sha1 of the head), except for the branch tips, which are exposed as
refs/heads/branches/$branch/tip.
The shorthand all (also the default), is the combination of bookmarks,
heads, and tips.
The refs style can also be configured per remote with the
remote.$remote.cinnabar-refs configuration. It is also possible to use
cinnabar.pushrefs or remote.$remote.cinnabar-pushrefs to use a different
scheme for pushes only.
Because mercurial stores tags in a file in the repository, it is not possible for git-cinnabar to know them when git asks for them, except when the repository has already been updated. Until version 0.4.0, git-cinnabar would try to get tags in a best effort way.
Furthermore, the way tags are tracked across branches in mercurial can make it awkward when pulling from multiple mercurial repositories. For example, pulling tags from mozilla-release, mozilla-beta, and mozilla-esr* repositories is messy.
So, as of 0.5.0, tags are not associated with mercurial remotes anymore, and one needs to setup a separate remote that consolidates all mercurial tags tracked by git-cinnabar. That remote can be set like the following:
$ git remote add tags hg::tags:
And tags can be updated with, e.g.:
$ git fetch tags
It can sometimes be useful to fetch a specific mercurial changeset from a remote server, without fetching the entire repository. This can be done with a command line such as:
$ git cinnabar fetch hg::<mercurial repo> <changeset sha1>
When dealing with a remote repository that doesn't use the same identifiers, things can easily get complicated. Git-cinnabar comes with commands to know the mercurial changeset a git commit represents and the other way around.
The following command will give you the git commit corresponding to the given mercurial changeset sha1:
$ git cinnabar hg2git <changeset>
The following command will give you the mercurial changeset corresponding to the given git commit sha1:
$ git cinnabar git2hg <commit>
Both commands allow abbreviated forms, as long as they are unambiguous (no need for all the 40 hex digits of the sha1).
In some cases, it is not desirable to have git-cinnabar create metadata for all pushed commits. Notably, for volatile commits such as those used on the Mozilla try repository.
By default, git-cinnabar doesn't store metadata when pushing to non-publishing repositories. It does otherwise.
This behavior can be changed per-remote with a remote.$remote.cinnabar-data
preference with one of the following values:
- always
- never
- phase
phase is the default described above. always and never are
self-explanatory.
For large repositories, an initial clone can take a large amount of time.
A Mercurial server operator can install the extension provided in
mercurial/cinnabarclone.py, and point to a git repository or bundle
containing pre-generated git-cinnabar metadata. See details in the
extension file.
Users cloning the repository would automatically get the metadata from the git repository or bundle, and then pull the missing changesets from the Mercurial repository.
At the moment, push is limited to non-merge commits.
There is no support for the following mercurial features: - obsolescence markers - phases - namespaces
Git-cinnabar is still in early infancy, and its metadata might get corrupted for some reason.
The following command allows to detect various types of metadata corruption:
git cinnabar fsck
This command will fix the corruptions it can, as well as adjust some of the metadata that contains items that became unnecessary in newer versions.
The --full option may be added for a more thorough validation of the metadata
contents. Using this option adds a significant amount of work, and the command
can take more than half an hour on repositories the size of mozilla-central.
hg:// urls:The msys shell (not msys2) doesn't keep hg::url intact when crossing the
msys/native boundary, so when running cinnabar in a msys shell with a native
git, the url is munged as hg;;proto;\host\path\, which git doesn't understand
and doesn't even start redirecting to git-remote-hg.
To allow such setups to still work, hg:// urls are supported. But since
mercurial can be either on many different protocols, we abuse the port in the
given url to pass the protocol.
A hg:// url thus looks like:
hg://<host>[:[<port>.]<protocol>]/<path>
The default protocol is https, and the port can be omitted.
hg::https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central becomes
hg://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central
hg::http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central becomes
hg://hg.mozilla.org:http/mozilla-central
hg::ssh://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central becomes
hg://hg.mozilla.org:ssh/mozilla-central
hg::file:///some/path becomes (awkward) hg://:file/some/path
hg::http://localhost:8080/foo becomes hg://localhost:8080.http/foo
hg::tags: becomes hg://:tags
Git-cinnabar has a set of experimental features that can be enabled
independently. You can set the cinnabar.experiments git configuration to a
comma-separated list of those features to enable the selected ones, or to
all to enable them all. The available features are:
merge
Git-cinnabar currently doesn’t allow to push merge commits. The main reason for this is that generating the correct mercurial data for those merges is tricky, and needs to be gotten right.
The main caveat with this experimental support for pushing merges is that it currently doesn’t handle the case where a file was moved on one of the branches the same way mercurial would (i.e. the information would be lost to mercurial users).