I use an ant script to deploy my application. Before deploying, however, I preserve any uncommitted changes by committing them to another branch, but keeping them uncommitted in my current branch. I do this by shelving the changes, updating to the other branch, unshelving them (but with --keep), committing, updating back to the original branch and unshelving once more (but without --keep).
The problem with this is twofold. Firstly, shelving changes the content of my project which in some cases messes with my IDE. Secondly, when an error occurs within the ant script after the files were shelved, but before they where successfully unshelved, I am forced to unshelve them manually, which is a pain. The same goes for updating to and from the other branch.
Is there a better way of doing this?
-- EDIT --
After posting this, I managed to implement a better, albeit not ideal, solution. I check if there are local, uncommited changes, and if there are, I shelve them, mock the current branch in hg to be the other branch (using debugsetparent), commit any changes in the working directory (this is now effectively a merge with the original branch that accepts all changes from "other", but without updating at any point), unshelve the previously shelved changes, commit them and mock the current branch in hg to be the original branch, leaving the unshelved changes as local, uncommited changes.
This is better in that I don't update to the other branch and any real change that happens, as far as the IDE is concerned, is the shelving/unshelving of local changes. Previously, it would be affected by all the changes between my current branch and the other one, but now this is avoided.
Still it's not an ideal solution. I could avoid shelving altogether, but then the commit in the other branch would contain the local changes bundled up with any changes that resulted from the difference between the two branches, any I don't like that since it defeats the purpose of being able to quickly check the changes that were done between deploys.
