Perform an empty commit with mercurial
commit, mercurial, mercurial-queue, version-control
Solution
You can use `hg commit --amend` to create empty commits.
Just create an arbitrary commit and backout the change. Afterwards fold both commits together.
Example:
touch tmp # create dummy file
hg add tmp # add file and...
hg commit -m "tmp" # ... commit
hg rm tmp # remove the file again and ...
hg commit --amend -m "empty commit" # ... commit
Problem
With with Mercurial queues extension, I can make an empty commit with some commit message like so: ``` hg qnew patch_name -m "message" ``` Is there a way to do this without Mercurial queues? I tried simply: ``` hg commit -m "message" ``` but hg just says "nothing changed" and doesn't do the commit, and I don't see any "force" option that would override that. If you're wondering about my motivation for doing this: we have testing infrastructure where you push to a special repository and it will trigger automated tests to run. You need to put a special string into the commit message of the tipmost commit that says which tests to run. Obviously, I don't want this string in there when I push to the actual repository. Rather than amending the commit twice (once to add the special string, and a second time to remove it), I would find it cleaner to just add an empty commit, and then roll it back -- and I can do this with mq, but I'd like to find a way to do it without mq.