In mercurial, how do I apply a reverse-patch to a particular file?

Question

Related to Mercurial: Merging one file between branches in one repo , I\'m trying to perform a backout operation on a single file, even though that file was one of many particip

Answer 1

Here's what I would do: Use a fresh clone of the tip revision.

hg backout --merge -r revision_where_the_change_happened

to merge the reversed changes into the working copy.

Now copy the file in question to your regular working copy and commit

hg commit -m "Reversed the changes to file.h made in revision bla"

and throw away the clone you created above.

This way, mercurial doesn't know that there is a connection between revision_where_the_change_happened and this commit. If you want mercurial to remember this, instead do a

hg revert {all files except the one in question}

after merging the backout commit into the working copy and before commiting. For the second way, you don't need to work on a clone, because you want to keep the backout commit.

I would guess that the choice of which way you use depends on how big a part of the changeset the particular file change was.