Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

Getting Started with Mercurial Queues

Because MQ is implemented as an extension, you must explicitly enable it before you can use it. (You don’t need to download anything; MQ ships with the standard Mercurial distribution.) To enable MQ, edit your ~/.hgrc file, and add the lines below.

[extensions]
hgext.mq =

Once the extension is enabled, it will make a number of new commands available. To verify that the extension is working, you can use hg help to see if the qinit command is now available.

$ hg help qinit
hg qinit [-c]

init a new queue repository

    The queue repository is unversioned by default. If -c is
    specified, qinit will create a separate nested repository
    for patches (qinit -c may also be run later to convert
    an unversioned patch repository into a versioned one).
    You can use qcommit to commit changes to this queue repository.

options:

 -c --create-repo  create queue repository

use "hg -v help qinit" to show global options

You can use MQ with any Mercurial repository, and its commands only operate within that repository. To get started, simply prepare the repository using the qinit command.

$ hg init mq-sandbox
$ cd mq-sandbox
$ echo 'line 1' > file1
$ echo 'another line 1' > file2
$ hg add file1 file2
$ hg commit -m'first change'
$ hg qinit

This command creates an empty directory called .hg/patches, where MQ will keep its metadata. As with many Mercurial commands, the qinit command prints nothing if it succeeds.

Creating a New Patch

To begin work on a new patch, use the qnew command. ...