Is there any patch tools that work well with mercurial, when patch-based workflows fail causing .rej hunks in your repo

Question

I am looking for a better patch tool than the ones built into Mercurial, or a visual tool to help me edit patches so that they will get accepted into Mercurial or Gnu patch.

The mercurial wiki has a topic HandlingRejects which shows how simple it is to have Patching fail. I am looking to implement a mercurial based workflow for feature branch version control that is based on feature branches, and relies on exporting and reviewing patches before they are integrated. In my initial testing of this idea, the weakest link in my "patch out", and "review and accept and modify" patches is the way that patch rejection shuts me down.

Here are some common cases where mercurial patch imports fail on me:

Trivial changes to both upstream repoA and feature branch repoB, where a single line is added somewhere, on both branches. Since both branches have a history, it should be possible for a merge tool to see that "someone added one line in repoA, and someone else added one line in repoB". In the case of patch imports, though, this results in a patch import reject and a .rej file turd in your repository which you ahve to manually repair (by editing the .rej file until it can be applied).

The wiki page above mentions the mpatch tool that is found here. I am looking for other Better Merge Tools that (a) work with mercurial, and (b) can handle the trivial case noted in the Handling Rejects wiki page above. Note that mpatch does not work for my purposes, it seems I need something that is more of a rebase tool than a patch tool, and in my case, I may have to make the patch tool be syntax-aware (and thus specific to a single programming language).

I am looking for tools available for working on Windows, either natively, or even via something like cygwin. I am not using a Unix/Linux environment, although I am comfortable with Linux/Unix style tools.

I am not currently using the mq extensions, just exporting ranges of changes using hg export, and importing using hg import, and the rest of the work is my own inventions, however I have tagged this mq, as mq users will be familiar with this .rej handling problem.

Related question here shows ways of resolving such problems while using TortoiseHg.

Answer 1

Emacs is quite capable of handling .rej files.

However, if at all practical, I try to use hg pull --rebase whenever possible. Often I find myself wanting to rebase some lineage of patches onto another changeset that I've already pulled. In these cases I just strip the changeset and pull it in again from .hg/strip-backup, allowing me to use --rebase.