== Today's Mercurial command alias: a short form _hg incoming_

Like other modern VCSes, [[Mercurial http://mercurial.selenic.com/]]
allows you to define command aliases. This is a feature that I don't
use as much as I could, but every so often I work out one that's really
handy. Today's alias is something I've called '_hg pending_', a short form
summary version of '_hg incoming_'.

From my .hgrc:

> _[alias]_ \\
> _pending = incoming --template '* {desc|firstline}\n'_

This shows something that looks like:
> _* exp/html: detect "integration points" in SVG and MathML content_ \\
> _* runtime: faster GC mark phase_ \\
> _* cmd/cc: fix uint right shift in constant evaluation_ \\
> _* cmd/6g: peephole fixes/additions_

When I'm checking up on what's coming from an upstream repository that
I'm tracking, this is basically just what I want; I don't care about
who authored the change or its long description or the other full
information, I'd just like to get a quick overview of what I'll get with
a pull.

(This assumes that you are tracking Mercurial repositories that use
the decent and correct format for commit messages.)

Possibly I should make a version of this for _hg log_ too, but I
haven't felt the urge yet.

(I have no strong reason for calling it 'pending' instead of anything
else and there is probably a better term for it since I am bad with
names.)

=== Bonus: _sdiff_, a sysadmin-friendly diff alias

Another Mercurial 'alias' (sort of) that we've become very accustomed
to is something we call _hg sdiff_:

> _[extensions]_ \\
> _hgext.extdiff =_
>
> _[extdiff]_ \\
> _cmd.sdiff  = diff_ \\
> _opts.sdiff = -Nr_

This gives us an old-style diff of changes. This is not something you
would use as a programmer, but for sysadmins it turns out that the
context from unified diffs is basically pointless for many changes to
configuration files. In fact, zero-context diffs can be easier to read
because there is less clutter obscuring the actual changes.

(The one drawback of this is that Mercurial doesn't report the file
that has changed if there's only one. '_hg status_' is your friend
here.)

This especially matters to us because we often record configuration
file changes (in some diff form) in [[worklog entries
../sysadmin/ChecklistEvolution]] (which also helps [[other sysadmins to
stay on top of the changes ../sysadmin/WhyWorklogsWorkForUs]]). When we
initially [[switched to Mercurial ../sysadmin/MercurialVsGit]] from RCS,
the increased verbosity of the default _hg diff_ unified diff output
became vaguely annoying. Creating _hg sdiff_ helped significantly.

(Having written this, I guess we could experiment with forcing zero
lines of context for unified diffs. However we're well accustomed to
old-style diff output as it is, so I suspect we wouldn't really find it
much of an improvement.)