Nuclear option

[brownbetty]

So, having finally figured out Mercurial, at least, enough to realize everything I was doing wrong, I would like to nuke my hack's disfigured copy of the code and start again clean. (It's not really necessary to carefully swap out patches that I made by accident, and reapply them every update. In fact, I'd really rather not.)

It seemed like the nice and simple way to do this was

$hg update -C tip

, but when I tried that, I got

abort: 00changelog.i: no node 949b5cec2d2896f33952d57abcc52696717c90c8!

which is MAGNIFICENTLY uninformative.

Is there a way to fix that? Alternately, am I doing completely the wrong thing?

Comments

[ursamajor]

I tried to do something like this when I was royally screwing up syncing between CVS and live (and ending up with 5-6 different copies of each file I changed, which resulted in a 71,000 line diff file), but I *think* I did something different, because at some point, the amount of "fix this" meant it was easier to just reinstall my hack. Let me see if I can track down the instructions, unless someone more knowledgeable comes along *G*

[brownbetty]

Thank you!

[hotlevel4]

Did you ever figure out how to clear out the code and start over again? I'd like to do something similar with my hack.

[brownbetty]

I don't know if it's how you're supposed to do it, but if you follow the directions for syncing to the repos outlined here as a script, but omitting the first step, where all of one's changes are stuck in the queue. It has the effect of overwriting all your changes. (I think.)

[hotlevel4]

I'll give that a try. Thanks!

[sophie]

I'm just going through all the posts here and tagging them, and I realised I never replied to this. So for the sake of anyone who stumbles upon this later...

If you're using a Dreamhack at hack.dreamwidth.net, you can request a fully automatic reinstall of your entire account. It'll delete your account and reinstall it as if from scratch, though it copies your SSH password across. It does mean that you would lose any additional files you had, like any patches, so you should copy them over to your own computer first.

That said, to request a reinstall, type the following at the prompt:

echo reinstall > /dreamhack/var/maintain.d/$$

...and then wait. After a minute or so, you'll get an automatic message on the screen detailing the reinstall process and offering a final option to opt-out of it. If you don't do so after another minute, you'll be logged out and the Dreamhack will be reinstalled automatically. You'll be emailed at the address you gave when you first signed up when the process is done.