figuring out mercurial

[Thomas L. Scofield]

I know I could probably do a lot of reading (and certainly should!) to find the answer to my questions---I'm just sure someone out there can give me the basic idea much quicker.  So that you know, this is my first time doing shared program development, so I don't have any experience with CVS, svn, etc. to draw on.

I started with the commands

   hg clone http://www.octave.org/hg/octave

   hg clone octave octave-imread1

The files I've worked on thus far (and wish to submit their changes) were new to Octave; until now they have been part of the image package (in octave-forge).  After some fiddling, I decided that I should add these two files in their unaltered (octave-forge) form first.  I placed them in src/DLD_FUNCTIONS, then ran

   hg add <file1>

   hg add <file2>

I then replaced both of these files with my altered copies.  Then I ran

   hg diff       (actually produces something meaningful, because of the procedure I followed)

   hg ci

Now I run "hg export" (or "hg export -o imread.diff"), and get the message

   abort: export requires at least one changeset

What should I be doing differently?  Also, will "hg export", when run properly, be the last step in the process?  Or will I need to send an email to the maintainers list with a .diff file attached?

Thanks.

Thomas L. Scofield

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Associate Professor

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Calvin College

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