A Tour Through History

One of the first things we might want to do with a new, unfamiliar repository is understand its history. The hg log command gives us a view of the history of changes in the repository.

$ hg log
changeset:   4:2278160e78d4
tag:         tip
user:        Bryan O'Sullivan <bos@serpentine.com>
date:        Sat Aug 16 22:16:53 2008 +0200
summary:     Trim comments.

changeset:   3:0272e0d5a517
user:        Bryan O'Sullivan <bos@serpentine.com>
date:        Sat Aug 16 22:08:02 2008 +0200
summary:     Get make to generate the final binary from a .o file.

changeset:   2:fef857204a0c
user:        Bryan O'Sullivan <bos@serpentine.com>
date:        Sat Aug 16 22:05:04 2008 +0200
summary:     Introduce a typo into hello.c.

changeset:   1:82e55d328c8c
user:        mpm@selenic.com
date:        Fri Aug 26 01:21:28 2005 -0700
summary:     Create a makefile

changeset:   0:0a04b987be5a
user:        mpm@selenic.com
date:        Fri Aug 26 01:20:50 2005 -0700
summary:     Create a standard "hello, world" program

By default, this command prints a brief paragraph of output for each change to the project that was recorded. In Mercurial terminology, we call each of these recorded events a changeset, because it can contain a record of changes to several files.

The fields in a record of output from hg log are as follows:

  • changeset: This field has the format of a number, followed by a colon, followed by a hexadecimal (or hex) string. These are identifiers for the changeset. The hex string is a unique identifier: the same hex string will always refer to the same changeset in every copy of this repository. ...

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