partial commits

[Edward Peschko]

All,

I've been using mercurial for a month now, and there is one thing that
I've noticed which is fairly annoying..

That has to do with partial commits. Say I modify 3 files - totally
unrelated changes, they so happen to work with each other but I want
to track them separately, and then I get 1 file working (and want to
commit and push it).

As it stands, there is no easy way to do this. I can modify that one
file, and commit it, but as it stands there is no good way to push it
- that I can see - without committing the other two files. I can pull,
and update, but when I try to push it says:

    - abort: push creates new remote branches! (did you forget to
merge? use push -f to force)

So, I try to merge. And when it does so, I get:

    - abort: outstanding uncommitted changes

which means that I have to enter in all my changes into mercurial
before I do a merge.

Why? Couldn't mercurial do automatically what I need to do manually,
namely make a patch based on the current branch, move it to a separate
location, do the merge, and then apply the patch on top of it? If this
functionality is already available, how do I do this?

Ed