After using Acquia Drupal for a while, I took advantage of a trial subscription to the Acquia Network. The network’s services showed me that I had files present in my install that the agent could not account for.
I suspected this was happening because of the way I manage my Acquia Drupal installation with Mercurial. So, I’ve modified my previous process (and updated my instructions) to extract the downloaded tar archive with the --recursive-unlink option. This option appears to successfully remove the contents of every directory before putting new files back into them.
When the archive is extracted in this way, my repository’s working directory shows modified, unknown, and deleted files. This allows me to treat each category of files individually before I commit the changes for a Drupal update as a revision.
$ hg status
The modified files will be tracked normally because they’ve already been added to the Mercurial repository, so I don’t need to do anything special for them.
The unknown files are ones that are completely new, and have not appeared in the same position in a previous revision. They have yet to be tracked by Mercurial, so I have to add them to the repository. To add just those unknown files, then, I have to pick them out from the status listing:
$ hg status --unknown
In order to operate just on those files to add them to the repository, I run a for loop:
This changes the “?” status to “A,” because the files were successfully being tracked by Mercurial.
I use the “--no-status” flag on the “status” command so that just the file paths are printed; the actual status code is not, which is appropriate for the target of the “add” command in the loop.
I do the same basic steps with deleted files. These are files that were in the previous revisions but have been deleted by the --recursive-unlink option from the tar extraction and not replaced with the extraction of the new Acquia Drupal tar archive. If the deleted files had been replaced by the tar extraction, they would either be unchanged (which would not show up in the “status” output) or marked as modified.
To remove the files that are marked as deleted from the repository’s working directory:
However, that may be the same as simply using the following, which I have to explore further:
$ hg remove --after
So, to follow all of these changes in the repository, I run the loop for the uknown files and the loop for the deleted files. The modified files are already tracked, so I don’t need to do anything additional for them. After that, a “commit” will record all of the changes — modifications, additions, and deletions — in the repo.
These commands are based on my current understanding of Mercurial, and they do work for me right now. There could certainly be another better way to do this in one fell swoop — or at least fewer steps. I would welcome that, so if you’re aware of a way, feel free to comment or contact me.
Update: I found that the “hg addremove” command cleanly replaces all of the shell loops I mentioned above. Therefore, I recommend using it instead of the “for” loops I described.