NAME
mr - a Multiple Repository management tool
SYNOPSIS
mr [options] checkout
mr [options] update
mr [options] status
mr [options] commit [-m "message"]
mr [options] record [-m "message"]
mr [options] diff
mr [options] log
mr [options] bootstrap url [directory]
mr [options] register [repository]
mr [options] config section ["parameter=[value]" ...]
mr [options] action [params ...]
mr [options] [online|offline]
mr [options] remember action [params ...]
DESCRIPTION
mr is a Multiple Repository management tool. It can checkout, update,
or perform other actions on a set of repositories as if they were one
combined repository. It supports any combination of subversion, git,
cvs, mercurial, bzr and darcs repositories, and support for other
revision control systems can easily be added.
mr cds into and operates on all registered repositories at or below
your working directory. Or, if you are in a subdirectory of a
repository that contains no other registered repositories, it will stay
in that directory, and work on only that repository,
mr is configured by .mrconfig files, which list the repositories. It
starts by reading the .mrconfig file in your home directory, and this
can in turn chain load .mrconfig files from repositories.
These predefined commands should be fairly familiar to users of any
revision control system:
checkout (or co)
Checks out any repositories that are not already checked out.
update
Updates each repository from its configured remote repository.
If a repository isn’t checked out yet, it will first check it out.
status
Displays a status report for each repository, showing what
uncommitted changes are present in the repository.
commit (or ci)
Commits changes to each repository. (By default, changes are pushed
to the remote repository too, when using distributed systems like
git. If you don’t like this default, you can change it in your
.mrconfig, or use record instead.)
The optional -m parameter allows specifying a commit message.
record
Records changes to the local repository, but does not push them to
the remote repository. Only supported for distributed revision
control systems.
The optional -m parameter allows specifying a commit message.
push
Pushes committed local changes to the remote repository. A no-op
for centralized revision control systems.
diff
Show a diff of uncommitted changes.
log Show the commit log.
These commands are also available:
bootstrap url [directory]
Causes mr to download the url, and use it as a .mrconfig file to
checkout the repositories listed in it, into the specified
directory.
The directory will be created if it does not exist. If no directory
is specified, the current directory will be used.
If the .mrconfig file includes a repository named ".", that is
checked out into the top of the specified directory.
list (or ls)
List the repositories that mr will act on.
register
Register an existing repository in a mrconfig file. By default, the
repository in the current directory is registered, or you can
specify a directory to register.
The mrconfig file that is modified is chosen by either the -c
option, or by looking for the closest known one at or below the
current directory.
config
Adds, modifies, removes, or prints a value from a mrconfig file.
The next parameter is the name of the section the value is in. To
add or modify values, use one or more instances of
"parameter=value". Use "parameter=" to remove a parameter. Use just
"parameter" to get the value of a parameter.
For example, to add (or edit) a repository in src/foo:
mr config src/foo checkout="svn co svn://example.com/foo/trunk foo"
To show the command that mr uses to update the repository in
src/foo:
mr config src/foo update
To see the built-in library of shell functions contained in mr:
mr config DEFAULT lib
The ~/.mrconfig file is used by default. To use a different config
file, use the -c option.
offline
Advises mr that it is in offline mode. Any commands that fail in
offline mode will be remembered, and retried when mr is told it’s
online.
online
Advices mr that it is in online mode again. Commands that failed
while in offline mode will be re-run.
remember
Remember a command, to be run later when mr re-enters online mode.
This implicitly puts mr into offline mode. The command can be any
regular mr command. This is useful when you know that a command
will fail due to being offline, and so don’t want to run it right
now at all, but just remember to run it when you go back online.
help
Displays this help.
Actions can be abbreviated to any unambiguous substring, so "mr st" is
equivalent to "mr status", and "mr up" is equivalent to "mr update"
Additional parameters can be passed to most commands, and are passed on
unchanged to the underlying revision control system. This is mostly
useful if the repositories mr will act on all use the same revision
control system.
OPTIONS
-d directory
--directory directory
Specifies the topmost directory that mr should work in. The default
is the current working directory.
-c mrconfig
--config mrconfig
Use the specified mrconfig file. The default is ~/.mrconfig
-p
--path
Search in the current directory, and its parent directories and use
the first .mrconfig found, instead of the default ~/.mrconfig.
-v
--verbose
Be verbose.
-q
--quiet
Be quiet.
-k
--insecure
Accept untrusted SSL certificates when bootstrapping.
-s
--stats
Expand the statistics line displayed at the end to include
information about exactly which repositories failed and were
skipped, if any.
-i
--interactive
Interactive mode. If a repository fails to be processed, a subshell
will be started which you can use to resolve or investigate the
problem. Exit the subshell to continue the mr run.
-n [number]
--no-recurse [number]
If no number if specified, just operate on the repository for the
current directory, do not recurse into deeper repositories.
If a number is specified, will recurse into repositories at most
that many subdirectories deep. For example, with -n 2 it would
recurse into ./src/foo, but not ./src/packages/bar.
-j [number]
--jobs [number]
Run the specified number of jobs in parallel, or an unlimited
number of jobs with no number specified. This can greatly speed up
operations such as updates. It is not recommended for interactive
operations.
Note that running more than 10 jobs at a time is likely to run
afoul of ssh connection limits. Running between 3 and 5 jobs at a
time will yield a good speedup in updates without loading the
machine too much.
-t
--trust-all
Trust all mrconfig files even if they are not listed in ~/.mrtrust.
Use with caution.
"MRCONFIG FILES"
Here is an example .mrconfig file:
[src]
checkout = svn co svn://svn.example.com/src/trunk src
chain = true
[src/linux-2.6]
checkout = git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git &&
cd linux-2.6 &&
git checkout -b mybranch origin/master
The .mrconfig file uses a variant of the INI file format. Lines
starting with "#" are comments. Values can be continued to the
following line by indenting the line with whitespace.
The "DEFAULT" section allows setting default values for the sections
that come after it.
The "ALIAS" section allows adding aliases for actions. Each parameter
is an alias, and its value is the action to use.
All other sections add repositories. The section header specifies the
directory where the repository is located. This is relative to the
directory that contains the mrconfig file, but you can also choose to
use absolute paths. (Note that you can use environment variables in
section names; they will be passed through the shell for expansion. For
example, "[$HOSTNAME]", or "[${HOSTNAME}foo]")
Within a section, each parameter defines a shell command to run to
handle a given action. mr contains default handlers for "update",
"status", "commit", and other standard actions. Normally you only need
to specify what to do for "checkout".
Note that these shell commands are run in a "set -e" shell environment,
where any additional parameters you pass are available in "$@". The
"checkout" command is run in the parent of the repository directory,
since the repository isn’t checked out yet. All other commands are run
inside the repository, though not necessarily at the top of it.
The "MR_REPO" environment variable is set to the path to the top of the
repository. (For the "register" action, "MR_REPO" is instead set to the
basename of the directory that should be created when checking the
repository out.)
The "MR_CONFIG" environment variable is set to the .mrconfig file that
defines the repo being acted on, or, if the repo is not yet in a config
file, the .mrconfig file that should be modified to register the repo.
A few parameters have special meanings:
skip
If the "skip" parameter is set and its command returns true, then
mr will skip acting on that repository. The command is passed the
action name in $1.
Here are two examples. The first skips the repo unless mr is run by
joey. The second uses the hours_since function (included in mr’s
built-in library) to skip updating the repo unless it’s been at
least 12 hours since the last update.
skip = test `whoami` != joey
skip = [ "$1" = update ] && ! hours_since "$1" 12
order
The "order" parameter can be used to override the default ordering
of repositories. The default order value is 10. Use smaller values
to make repositories be processed earlier, and larger values to
make repositories be processed later.
Note that if a repository is located in a subdirectory of another
repository, ordering it to be processed earlier is not recommended.
chain
If the "chain" parameter is set and its command returns true, then
mr will try to load a .mrconfig file from the root of the
repository.
include
If the "include" parameter is set, its command is ran, and should
output additional mrconfig file content. The content is included as
if it were part of the including file.
Unlike all other parameters, this parameter does not need to be
placed within a section.
lib The "lib" parameter can specify some shell code that will be run
before each command, this can be a useful way to define shell
functions for other commands to use.
When looking for a command to run for a given action, mr first looks
for a parameter with the same name as the action. If that is not found,
it looks for a parameter named "rcs_action" (substituting in the name
of the revision control system and the action). The name of the
revision control system is itself determined by running each defined
"rcs_test" action, until one succeeds.
Internally, mr has settings for "git_update", "svn_update", etc. To
change the action that is performed for a given revision control
system, you can override these rcs specific actions. To add a new
revision control system, you can just add rcs specific actions for it.
The ~/.mrlog file contains commands that mr has remembered to run
later, due to being offline. You can delete or edit this file to remove
commands, or even to add other commands for ’mr online’ to run. If the
file is present, mr assumes it is in offline mode.
"UNTRUSTED MRCONFIG FILES"
Since mrconfig files can contain arbitrary shell commands, they can do
anything. This flexability is good, but it also allows a malicious
mrconfig file to delete your whole home directory. Such a file might be
contained inside a repository that your main ~/.mrconfig checks out and
chains to. To avoid worries about evil commands in a mrconfig file, mr
has the ability to read mrconfig files in untrusted mode. Such files
are limited to running only known safe commands (like "git clone") in a
carefully checked manner.
By default, mr trusts all mrconfig files. (This default will change in
a future release!) But if you have a ~/.mrtrust file, mr will only
trust mrconfig files that are listed within it. (One file per line.)
All other files will be treated as untrusted.
EXTENSIONS
mr can be extended to support things such as unison and git-svn. Some
files providing such extensions are available in /usr/share/mr/. See
the documentation in the files for details about using them.
AUTHOR
Copyright 2007-2009 Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>
Licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 or higher.
http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/mr/