hg rebase abort fails: "unknown revision"

Question

Occasionally when performing a rebase using the MercurialEclipse plugin my repository gets thrown into an odd state. It will become stuck in a "rebasing" state, yet when I try to abort the rebase (e.g. "hg rebase -a") I get this error message:

abort: unknown revision 'xxxx'!

Where xxxx is a revision hash. Usually at this point I've abandoned all hope of performing the rebase -- I just want to get back to a happier time when my repository was not screwed up. So far my solution has been to nuke my project directory and clone it again. Is there a less drastic solution?

Cite

I can confirm the issue still exists, this was discussed on the lists: comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.devel/… but no fix is still in – Sensitometer

Answer 1

Just remove the .hg/rebasestate and your repo will work.

The patch described in this thread calls the internal function clearstate which just unlinks this file.

Sensitometer

Hah, it worked! Thanks also for finding the issue on the hg devlist. Perhaps we can revisit this answer once the issue is fixed. – Cite

Answer 2

In situations similar to this, I usually do:

$ hg check
$ hg verify
$ hg up -C default

Instead of default, use whatever branch you're working on. This takes time, but so does re-cloning the repo.

It usually helps.

Puttyroot