Hg: How to do a rebase like git's rebase

VonC has the answer you're looking for, the Rebase Extension. It is, however, worth spending a second or two thinking about why neither mq nor rebase are enabled by default in mercurial: because mercurial is all about indelible changesets. When I work in the manner you're describing, which is nearly daily, here's the pattern I take:

1. Start working on a new feature:
$ hg clone mainline-repo newfeature-123
do a few commits (M, N, O)

master A---B---C
                \
newfeature-123   M---N---O

2. Pull new changes from upstream mainline:
$ hg pull

master A---B---C---D---E---F
                \
newfeature-123   M---N---O

3. merge master into my clone so that my new feature 
can be developed against the latest upstream changes:
(from newfeature-123)
$ hg merge F

master A---B---C---D---E---F
                \           \
newfeature-123   M---N---O---P

and that's really all that's necessary. I end up with a newfeature-123 clone I can easily push back to the mainline when I'm happy with it. Most importantly, however, I never changed history. Someone can look at my csets and see what they were originally coded against and how I reacted to changes in the mainline throughout my work. Not everyone thinks that has value, but I'm a firm believer that it's the job of source control to show us not what we wished had happened, but what actually happened -- every deadend and every refactor should leave an indelible trace, and rebasing and other history editing techniques hide that.

Now go pick VonC's answer while I put my soapbox away. :)

You might be looking for Rebase Extension. (implemented as part of the SummerOfCode 2008)

In those cases it can be useful to "detach" the local changes, synchronize the repository with the mainstream and then append the private changes on top of the new remote changes. This operation is called rebase.

Getting from:

to:

---

As commented below by steprobe:

In the case where you aren't pulling the changes in, and you have the two branches in your repo, you can do (using keepbranches):

hg up newfeature-123 
hg rebase -d master --keepbranches

(--keepbranches: Inherit the original branch name.)

Mojca mentions:

I like using hg rebase --source {L1's-sha} --dest {R2's-sha}, but I didn't know I could add --keepbranches at the end.

As illustrated below by Jonathan Blackburn:

 hg rebase -d default --keepbranches

Assuming you have a modern Hg installation, you can simply add:

[extensions]
rebase = 

to ~/.hgrc.

Then you can use the commands hg rebase, hg pull --rebase, or hg help rebase.