Until today, we had most of the projects on Mercurial repositories hosted on a Windows box in-house. The Mercurial web interface was set up to provide a convenient read-only access to both contributors and non-contributors within. However, the box in question was unreliable, and so was the Internet link it was alive on. And, in this world, there are few things more troublesome than having your source control server unavailable due to an unexpected downtime.
What’s special about today is that we moved most of our Mercurial repositories to BitBucket.org. While they will remain private, the contributors as well as the internal non-contributors will be given access to them. Aside from having the repositories on a central server that we can mostly always rely on, having a lovely Web interface to browse and control the repositories, we also get useful goodies like issue trackers, wiki pages, and an easy user management interface. It is a win-win situation for everyone.
One of the projects I was working on had only been on a local Git repository. I started work on it at a time when I found myself deeply in love with Git. Since BitBucket is a Mercurial repository warehouse, I had to find a way to convert or migrate the Git repository into a Mercurial one.
I looked around on the Web and found a lot of people recommending the use of the HgGit plugin. As I understood it, this plugin made possible, among other things, the workflow that involved working on a Git repository and pushing the changesets to a Mercurial counterpart. However, the process of setting it up seemed rather complex to me. Plus, I didn’t want to keep the Git repository lying around when I was done with the migration. I wanted to be able to migrate the Git repository to a Mercurial one, push it upstream to BitBucket and make any changes in future in the source code by cloning from the Mercurial repository. What HgGit did seemed rather overkill for my needs.
I then discovered the Mercurial ConvertExtension. This extension did just what I wanted: Convert repositories from a handful different SCMs into Mercurial. The process of converting a Git (or any other repository) to a Mercurial one through ConvertExtension is very straightforward.
As a first step, you are required to edit your global .hgrc file to enable the extension thus:
[extensions]
hgext.convert=
You are then required to run the hg convert command on your target Git repository thus:
$ hg convert /path/to/git/repo
This will migrate the Git repository, and store it in the current directory inside a directory named repo-hg. Once inside the newly created Mercurial repository (and this part is important), you have to run the following command to checkout all the changesets:
$ hg checkout
You may then push the repository with the usual hg push to BitBucket.
:)
PS: This blog post really helped get me going in the right direction.
Libel 