Reconstruct / rebuild a mercurial repository

Question

First off: I know that hg branches are immutable and they cannot be renamed. I am also aware of the existence of the mutable branches extension for hg. But I'd prefer a different approach, as I can never be sure that all of our developers have it installed and active, it's still "only" an extension.

My question: We have a repo with about 20 branches in it. Due to various reasons (inexperienced use, bad choices, experiments that became production environments) some of those branches were named badly and now our repo is a little confusing. What we'd like to do is rename a few of those branches, because obviously, the more we work with them, the more it's becoming a problem.

Do you have any suggestions? I already thought of a "tool" or some kind of script that recreates the whole repo from scratch, getting changesets of the old repo and committing them - with new branch names - to a new repo, "rebuilding" it. But before I go and waste time in writing something like that, I'd like to hear if there are other possibilities.

FYI: there are about 600 commits with frequent merges across the various branches.

Answer 1

You can rebuild the repository by doing a Mercurial to Mercurial conversion using hg convert. Enable the convert extension first and create a branchmap to do the mapping of branch names from old to new:

a-bad-name new-name
another-bad-name better-name

You can use that to map multiple bad names into a single good name, for example.

After the conversion, you will have a new repository with the same history, but with different branch names. The changeset hashes will thus be different and people will have to reclone (but I think you're aware of this already).