cinnabar is the common natural form in which mercury can be found on Earth. It contains mercury sulfide and its powder is used to make the vermillion pigment.

git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. Contrary to other such helpers ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]), it doesn't use a local mercurial clone under the hood.

The main focus at the moment is to make it work with mozilla-central and related mercurial repositories and support Mozilla workflows (try server, etc.).

Repositories last used with versions lower than 0.5.0 are not supported. Please run git cinnabar upgrade with version 0.5.0 first.

The git-cinnabar source code is distributed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License version 2.0 (see the MPL-2.0 file), with parts (the git-core subdirectory) distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.0 (see the git-core/COPYING file).

As a consequence, git-cinnabar binary executables are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.0.

• Git (any version should work ; cinnabarclone bundles require 1.4.4).
• In order to build from source:
  • Rust 1.74.0 or newer.
  • A C compiler (GCC or clang).
  • make.
  • CURL development headers and libraries (except on Windows). Please note that on MacOS they are included in the SDK.

• Assuming a prebuilt binary is available for your system, get the download.py script and run it (requires python 3.9 or newer) with:

  $ ./download.py
  

• Add the directory where the download happened to your PATH. If you have another git-remote-hg project in your PATH already, make sure the git-cinnabar path comes before.

• Run the following:

  $ cargo install --locked git-cinnabar
  $ git cinnabar setup
  

• Run the following:

  $ git clone https://github.com/glandium/git-cinnabar
  $ cd git-cinnabar
  $ make
  

• Add the git-cinnabar directory to your PATH.

$ git clone hg::<mercurial repo>

where <mercurial repo> can be a path to a local directory containing a mercurial repository, or a http, https or ssh url.

Essentially, use git like you would for a git repository, but use a hg:: url where you would use a git:// url.

See https://github.com/glandium/git-cinnabar/wiki/Mozilla:-A-git-workflow-for-Gecko-development for an example workflow for Mozilla repositories.

Mercurial has two different ways to handle what git would call branches: branches and bookmarks. Mercurial branches are permanent markers on each changeset that belongs to them, and bookmarks are similar to git branches.

You may choose how to interact with those with the cinnabar.refs configuration. The following values are supported, either individually or combined in a comma-separated list:

• bookmarks: in this mode, the mercurial repository's bookmarks are exposed as refs/heads/$bookmark. Practically speaking, this means the mercurial bookmarks appear as the remote git branches.

• tips: in this mode, the most recent head of each mercurial branch is exposed as refs/heads/$branch. Any other head of the same branch is not exposed. This mode can be useful when branches have no more than one head.

• heads: in this mode, the mercurial repository's heads are exposed as refs/heads/$branch/$head, where $branch is the mercurial branch name and $head is the full changeset sha1 of that head.

When these values are used in combinations, the branch mappings are varied accordingly to make the type of each remote ref explicit and to avoid name collisions.

• When combining bookmarks and heads, bookmarks are exposed as refs/heads/bookmarks/$bookmark and branch heads are exposed as refs/heads/branches/$branch/$head (where $head is the full changeset sha1 of the head).

• When combining bookmarks and tips, bookmarks are exposed as refs/heads/bookmarks/$bookmark and branch tips are exposed as refs/heads/branches/$branch. Any other heads of the same branch are not exposed.

• When combining all of bookmarks, heads, and tips, bookmarks are exposed as refs/heads/bookmarks/$bookmark, branch heads are exposed as refs/heads/branches/$branch/$head (where $head is the full changeset sha1 of the head), except for the branch tips, which are exposed as refs/heads/branches/$branch/tip.

The shorthand all (also the default), is the combination of bookmarks, heads, and tips.

The refs style can also be configured per remote with the remote.$remote.cinnabar-refs configuration. It is also possible to use cinnabar.pushrefs or remote.$remote.cinnabar-pushrefs to use a different scheme for pushes only.

You can get/update tags with the following command:

$ git cinnabar fetch --tags

It can sometimes be useful to fetch a specific mercurial changeset from a remote server, without fetching the entire repository. This can be done with a command line such as:

$ git cinnabar fetch hg::<mercurial repo> <changeset sha1>

When dealing with a remote repository that doesn't use the same identifiers, things can easily get complicated. Git-cinnabar comes with commands to know the mercurial changeset a git commit represents and the other way around.

The following command will give you the git commit corresponding to the given mercurial changeset sha1:

$ git cinnabar hg2git <changeset>

The following command will give you the mercurial changeset corresponding to the given git commit sha1:

$ git cinnabar git2hg <commit>

Both commands allow abbreviated forms, as long as they are unambiguous (no need for all the 40 hex digits of the sha1).

In some cases, it is not desirable to have git-cinnabar create metadata for all pushed commits. Notably, for volatile commits such as those used on the Mozilla try repository.

By default, git-cinnabar doesn't store metadata when pushing to non-publishing repositories. It does otherwise.

This behavior can be changed per-remote with a remote.$remote.cinnabar-data preference with one of the following values:

• always
• never
• phase
• force

phase is the default described above. always and never are self-explanatory. force has the same meaning as always, but also forces git push --dry-run to store metadata.

For large repositories, an initial clone can take a large amount of time. A Mercurial server operator can install the extension provided in mercurial/cinnabarclone.py, and point to a git repository or bundle containing pre-generated git-cinnabar metadata. See details in the extension file.

Users cloning the repository would automatically get the metadata from the git repository or bundle, and then pull the missing changesets from the Mercurial repository.

At the moment, push is limited to non-merge commits.

There is no support for the following mercurial features:

• obsolescence markers
• phases
• namespaces

Git-cinnabar is still in early infancy, and its metadata might get corrupted for some reason.

The following command allows to detect various types of metadata corruption:

git cinnabar fsck

This command will fix the corruptions it can, as well as adjust some of the metadata that contains items that became unnecessary in newer versions.

The --full option may be added for a more thorough validation of the metadata contents. Using this option adds a significant amount of work, and the command can take more than half an hour on repositories the size of mozilla-central.

The msys shell (not msys2) doesn't keep hg::url intact when crossing the msys/native boundary, so when running cinnabar in a msys shell with a native git, the url is munged as hg;;proto;\host\path\, which git doesn't understand and doesn't even start redirecting to git-remote-hg.

To allow such setups to still work, hg:// urls are supported. But since mercurial can be either on many different protocols, we abuse the port in the given url to pass the protocol.

A hg:// url thus looks like:

hg://<host>[:[<port>.]<protocol>]/<path>

The default protocol is https, and the port can be omitted.

• hg::https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central becomes hg://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central

• hg::http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central becomes hg://hg.mozilla.org:http/mozilla-central

• hg::ssh://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central becomes hg://hg.mozilla.org:ssh/mozilla-central

• hg::file:///some/path becomes (awkward) hg://:file/some/path

• hg::http://localhost:8080/foo becomes hg://localhost:8080.http/foo

• hg::tags: becomes hg://:tags

As of version 0.7, some corner cases in Mercurial repositories will generate different git commits than with prior versions of git-cinnabar. This means a fresh clone might have different git SHA-1s than existing clones, but this doesn't impact the use of existing clones with newer versions of git-cinnabar.

Most repositories should remain non-affected by the change.

You can set the cinnabar.compat git configuration to 0.6 to keep the previous behavior.

Git-cinnabar has a set of experimental features that can be enabled independently. You can set the cinnabar.experiments git configuration to a comma-separated list of those features to enable the selected ones.

The available features are:

• merge

  Git-cinnabar currently doesn’t allow to push merge commits. The main reason for this is that generating the correct mercurial data for those merges is tricky, and needs to be gotten right.

  The main caveat with this experimental support for pushing merges is that it currently doesn’t handle the case where a file was moved on one of the branches the same way mercurial would (i.e. the information would be lost to mercurial users).

• similarity

  Git doesn't track file copies or renames. It however has flags to try to detect them after the fact. On the other hand, Mercurial does track copies and renames, if they're recorded manually in the first place. Git-cinnabar does exact-copy/rename detection when pushing new commits to a Mercurial repository.

  The similarity feature allows to configure how (dis)similar files can be to be detected as a rename or copy. similarity=100 is the default, which means only 100% identical files are considered. similarity=90 means 90% identical files, and so on.

  This is equivalent to git diff -C -C${similarity}%