mercurial-HG tortoise windows, archive/export without .hgignore and .hg_archival.txt

Question

I'm just starting out with SVN with software I a writing and decided to install Mercurial (HG Tortoise) on my Win7. I have never used any version control, but I think I am slowly getting the hang of it. My workflow that I'm trying to do is this:

1. Make edits to appropriate code.
2. Commit the edits with a revision/tag
3. Right click on the revision I want from the Hg Workbench and Create Archive to export a directory that is then ready to be sent to my clients.

Is this flow correct? If so, how do I specify that two files, .hgignore and .hg_archival.txt , not be archived there? This is for clients remember, not for myself or other devs, so they should see only the code.

Should I instead be checking out, or cloning, or something, then manually zipping that up?

It's very hard to find a GUI-based tutorial for Tortoise that also communicates concepts of Mercurial (I found one for GIT but I like how Tortoise integrates Win7 shell better).

Answer 1

Use the archivemeta = false option of mercurial to avoid the .hg_archival.txt file.

Use the exclude filter on .hg* to avoid files starting with .hg like .hgignore

Regarding archivemeta option, see: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hgrc.5.html

Regarding the exclusion of files in hg archive command see http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hg.1.html#archive which states:

create a tarball excluding .hg files:

hg archive project.tar.gz -X ".hg*"

I know this answer relates rather to the command line than to Tortoise but it should be easy to adapt.

Answer 2

The result of using hg archive isn't much different than cloning and then deleting the .hg directory. If I wanted to have a quick way of cleaning a copy/clone of the repo such that it could be delivered, I would keep a script in the root of the repo (version controlled) that deletes specific files and directories and then maybe itself.

Since Windows 7 comes with Powershell, I would probably add a function to my profile that:

• calls hg archive
• starts the cleanup script
• deletes the cleanup script (rather than the script deleting itself)
• zips up the directory