Mercurial commit and merge

Question

With Mercurial I often see a scenario where I need to gradually commit an push, but if another person commits in the middle of this then I get into a problem.

Example: Assume the HG repo has four files a.txt, b.txt, c.txt, d.txt and we have two users Mickey and Goofy:

Mickey does:  $ echo "change1" >> a.txt
Mickey does:  $ echo "change2" >> b.txt
Mickey does:  $ echo "change3" >> c.txt
Mickey does:  $ hg commit -m "I am good" a.txt
Goofy does:   $ hg pull -u; echo "change4" >> d.txt; hg commit -m "The Donald change" 

Mickey gets ready to commit and push, but has has to merge: Mickey does: $ hg pull -u

Now Mickey has two changes - in b.txt and c.txt. Lets assume that his changes in c.txt are complex and cannot be released just now. How can Mickey get his changes in a.txt and b.txt committed and pushed without committing c.txt yet?

Answer 1

Just issue the filenames you're interested in committing:

hg commit a.txt b.txt -m'partial commit'

Then push as usual.

EDIT: Iyou could try saving the local changes as a patch, revert and pull the remote changes, then apply the patch:

hg diff > local.patch
hg revert
hg pull -u
patch -p1 < local.patch

Answer 2

Your question is not entirely clear to me, please correct me if I got you wrong.

What Mickey has in his repo is this (A — Mickey's changeset with a changed, D — Goofy's changeset with d changed, w — Mickey's working copy with b and c changed):

-- o --- A --- w
    \
     D

Now Mickey has a plenty of options. b is ready to be released, so he commits it immediately:

$ hg ci b.txt -m "Finished working on b.txt"

-- o --- A --- B --- w
    \
     D

Now only c changes are left in the working copy. Mickey does an intermediate commit:

$ hg ci -m "working on c"

-- o --- A --- B --- C' --- w
    \
     D

The working copy is clean. To make sure C' is not included in the merge, Mickey updates to the previous changeset, then merges:

$ hg up B
$ hg merge D
$ hg ci -m "Merged with Goofy"

-- o --- A --- B --- C
    \           \
     D --------- M --- w

Now Mickey can continue working on C, and amend the commit when it's ready:

$ hg up C
$ echo "final change" >> c.txt
$ hg ci --amend -m "Finished working on c.txt"

From here, Mickey can either merge, or rebase (by the way, merge with Goofy could be a rebase as well).