Ubuntu Manpage: mr - a tool to manage all your version control repos

Provided by: myrepos_1.20160123_all

NAME

       mr - a tool to manage all your version control repos

SYNOPSIS

       mr [options] checkout

       mr [options] update

       mr [options] status

       mr [options] clean [-f]

       mr [options] commit [-m "message"]

       mr [options] record [-m "message"]

       mr [options] fetch

       mr [options] push

       mr [options] diff

       mr [options] log

       mr [options] grep pattern

       mr [options] run command [param ...]

       mr [options] bootstrap src [directory]

       mr [options] register [repository]

       mr [options] config section ["setting=[value]" ...]

       mr [options] action [params ...]

       mr [options] [online|offline]

       mr [options] remember action [params ...]

DESCRIPTION

mr is a tool to manage all your version control repos. 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, darcs, fossil and veracity repositories, and support for other
version 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. It also
automatically looks for a .mrconfig file in the current directory, or in one of its parent directories.

These predefined commands should be fairly familiar to users of any version 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. For distributed version control systems, also shows unpushed local branches.

clean
Print ignored files, untracked files and other cruft in the working directory.

The optional -f parameter allows removing the files as well as printing them.

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 version control systems.

The optional -m parameter allows specifying a commit message.

fetch
Fetches from each repository's remote repository, but does not update the working copy. Only
supported for some distributed version control systems.

push
Pushes committed local changes to the remote repository. A no-op for centralized version control
systems.

diff
Show a diff of uncommitted changes.

log Show the commit log.

grep pattern
Searches for a pattern in each repository using the grep subcommand. Uses ack-grep on VCS that do not
have their own.

run command [param ...]
Runs the specified command in each repository.

These commands are also available:

bootstrap src [directory]
Causes mr to retrieve the source "src" and use it as a .mrconfig file to checkout the repositories
listed in it, into the specified directory.

mr understands several types of sources:

URL for curl
"src" may be an URL understood by curl.

copy via ssh
To use scp to download, the "src" may have the form "ssh://[user@]host:file".

local file
You can retrieve the config file by other means and pass its path as "src".

standard input
If source "src" consists in a single dash "-", config file is read from standard input.

The directory will be created if it does not exist. If no directory is specified, the current
directory will be used.

As a special case, if source "src" 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 in a parent of 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 "setting=value".
Use "setting=" to remove a setting. Use just "setting" to get the value of a that setting.

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 that is used is chosen by either the -c option, or by looking for the closest known
one at or in a parent of the current directory.

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
version control system. This is mostly useful if the repositories mr will act on all use the same version
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 to use both ~/.mrconfig as well as look for a
.mrconfig file in the current directory, or in one of its parent directories.

-f
--force
Force mr to act on repositories that would normally be skipped due to their configuration.

--force-env
Force mr to execute even though potentially dangerous environment variables are set.

-v
--verbose
Be verbose.

-m
--minimal
Minimise output. If a command fails or there is any output then the usual output will be shown.

-q
--quiet
Be quiet. This suppresses mr's usual output, as well as any output from commands that are run
(including stderr output). If a command fails, the output will be shown.

-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.

-p
--path
This obsolete flag is ignored.

MRCONFIG FILES

Here is an example .mrconfig file:

[src]
checkout = svn checkout 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 setting 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 setting 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". Here you specify the command to run in order
to create a checkout of the repository. The command will be run in the parent directory, and must create
the repository's directory. So use "git clone", "svn checkout", "bzr branch" or "bzr checkout" (for a
bound branch), etc.

Note that these shell commands are run in a "set -e" shell environment, where any additional parameters
you pass are available in $@. All commands other than "checkout" 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.

The "MR_ACTION" environment variable is set to the command being run (update, checkout, etc).

A few settings have special meanings:

skip
If "skip" 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.

[mystuff]
checkout = ...
skip = test `whoami` != joey

[linux]
checkout = ...
skip = [ "$1" = update ] && ! hours_since "$1" 12

Another way to use skip is for a lazy checkout. This makes mr skip operating on a repo unless it
already exists. To enable the repo, you have to explicitly check it out (using "mr --force -d foo
checkout").

[foo]
checkout = ...
skip = lazy

order
The "order" setting 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 "chain" is set and its command returns true, then mr will try to load a .mrconfig file from the
root of the repository.

include
If "include" 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 everything else, "include" does not need to be placed within a section.

mr ships several libraries that can be included to add support for additional version control type
things (unison, git-svn, git-fake-bare, git-subtree). To include them all, you could use:

include = cat /usr/share/mr/*

See the individual files for details.

deleted
If "deleted" is set and its command returns true, then mr will treat the repository as deleted. It
won't ever actually delete the repository, but it will warn if it sees the repository's directory.
This is useful when one mrconfig file is shared among multiple machines, to keep track of and
remember to delete old repositories.

lib The "lib" setting can contain 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.

Unlike most other settings, this can be specified multiple times, in which case the chunks of shell
code are accumulatively concatenated together.

fixups
If "fixups" is set, its command is run whenever a repository is checked out, or updated. This
provides an easy way to do things like permissions fixups, or other tweaks to the repository content,
whenever the repository is changed.

jobs
If "jobs" is set, run the specified number of jobs in parallel. This can greatly speed up operations
such as updates.

VCS_action
When looking for a command to run for a given action, mr first looks for a setting with the same name
as the action. If that is not found, it looks for a setting named "VCS_action" (substituting in the
name of the version control system and the action).

Internally, mr has settings for "git_update", "svn_update", etc. To change the action that is
performed for a given version control system, you can override these VCS specific actions. To add a
new version control system, you can just add VCS specific actions for it.

pre_ and post_
If "pre_action" is set, its command is run before mr performs the specified action. Similarly,
"post_action" commands are run after mr successfully performs the specified action. For example,
"pre_commit" is run before committing; "post_update" is run after updating.

_append
Any setting can be suffixed with "_append", to add an additional value to the existing value of the
setting. In this way, actions can be constructed accumulatively.

VCS_test
The name of the version control system is itself determined by running each defined "VCS_test"
action, until one succeeds.

UNTRUSTED MRCONFIG FILES

       Since  mrconfig  files  can  contain  arbitrary shell commands, they can do anything. This flexibility 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.  To  avoid  worries  about  evil
       commands in a mrconfig file, mr defaults to reading all mrconfig files other than the main ~/.mrconfig in
       untrusted  mode.  In untrusted mode, mrconfig files are limited to running only known safe commands (like
       "git clone") in a carefully checked manner.

       To configure mr to trust other mrconfig files, list them in ~/.mrtrust.   One  mrconfig  file  should  be
       listed  per line. Either the full pathname should be listed, or the pathname can start with ~/ to specify
       a file relative to your home directory.

OFFLINE LOG FILE

       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.

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.

EXIT STATUS

       mr returns nonzero if a command failed in any of the repositories.

AUTHOR

       Copyright 2007-2011 Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>

       Licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 or higher.

       http://myrepos.branchable.com/

perl v5.22.1                                       2016-01-23                                              MR(1)