HGKeeper

Title: Using Mercurial

Slug: using-mercurial

# Using Mercurial

## Introduction

These instructions will help you clone a copy of any of the Instant Messaging

Freedom hosted [Mercurial](https://mercurial-scm.org) repositories and keep

them up to date.

These instructions are just for cloning/updating the Instant Messaging Freedom

realated repositories. If you're looking for documentation on contributing

code, please see the [Code Contributions](code_contributions.md) page after you

have successfully cloned the repository from this page.

## Cloning

In Distributed Version Control, ***cloning*** is the act

of acquiring a source repository. All of the Instant Messaging Freedom related

repositories are hosted in Mercurial at

[keep.imfreedom.org](https://keep.imfreedom.org/). To clone them you will be

using the command `hg clone <URL>`. The specific URL can be looked up in the

table below depending on what you are trying to clone.

> If you are trying to build Pidgin 3, you can just clone that repository and

> the build system will automatically clone the other repositories for you.

### Repositories

| Repository | Description |

| ---------- | ----------- |

| [keep.imfreedom.org/gplugin/gplugin/](https://keep.imfreedom.org/gplugin/gplugin/) | The plugin library used in Pidgin 3. |

| [keep.imfreedom.org/libgnt/libgnt/](https://keep.imfreedom.org/libgnt/libgnt/) | The toolkit library used in Finch. |

| [keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/pidgin/](https://keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/pidgin/) | The main Pidgin repository. |

| [keep.imfreedom.org/talkatu/talkatu/](https://keep.imfreedom.org/talkatu/talkatu/) | The conversation widgets used in Pidgin 3. |

There are additional repositories under

[gplugin/](https://keep.imfreedom.org/gplugin/),

[libgnt/](https://keep.imfreedom.org/libgnt/),

[imfreedom/](https://keep.imfreedom.org/imfreedom/),

and [pidgin/](https://keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/)

which contain other miscellaneous things.

### Example

You can see an example clone of Talkatu below but all of the repositories will

output a similar result.

```sh

$ hg clone https://keep.imfreedom.org/talkatu/talkatu

destination directory: talkatu

requesting all changes

adding changesets

adding manifests

adding file changes

added 348 changesets with 1074 changes to 268 files

new changesets 0feed1461a4a:f0fda4aace2d

updating to branch default

109 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

```

## Keeping Your Clone Up To Date

If you are just tracking development and are not contributing, chances are you

still on the ***default*** branch. But let's make sure, and run

`hg update default`. This will change to the ***default*** branch if you're

not currently on it or do nothing.

Now that you are on the ***default*** branch, you can

simply run `hg pull --update` to pull in all new changes and

update your local copy. Please note, if you accidentally run

`hg pull`, that is without the update, a subsequent

`hg pull --update` will not update to the latest revisions as

this invocation of `hg pull` did not find any new revisions. To

properly update in this scenario, you'll need to run

`hg update`.

Below is an example of updating Talkatu when it's already up to date.

```sh

$ hg pull --update

pulling from https://keep.imfreedom.org/talkatu/talkatu

searching for changes

no changes found

```

At this point you can review the code, build it, patch it, etc.

imfreedom/contributors-guide