The mr(1) command can checkout, update, or perform other actions on a set of repositories as if they were one combined respository. It supports any combination of subversion, git, cvs, mercurial, bzr, darcs, cvs, and fossil repositories, and support for other revision control systems can easily be added. (There are extensions adding support for unison and git-svn.)

It is extremely configurable via simple shell scripting. Some examples of things it can do include:

  • Update a repository no more frequently than once every twelve hours.
  • Run an arbitrary command before committing to a repository.
  • When updating a git repository, pull from two different upstreams and merge the two together.
  • Run several repository updates in parallel, greatly speeding up the update process.
  • Remember actions that failed due to a laptop being offline, so they can be retried when it comes back online.

mr is available in git at git://git.kitenet.net/mr, or in gitweb. It's recently been added to Debian. If you want a tarball, the best place to get one is from http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/mr. Unofficial RPMs are provided by Douglas E. Warner.

News

mr 0.50 released with these changes

  • Now supports the Fossil VCS. (Thanks, Jimmy Tang)
  • Added fixups hook, which can be used to run a command after a repository is checked out or updated. Closes: #590868
  • Added support for arbitrary pre and post hooks for all defined mr commands. For example, pre_commit is run before all commits; post_update is run after all updates. Closes: #481341
Posted Sunday afternoon, August 29th, 2010

mr 0.49 released with these changes

  • Update suggests for git-core to git transition.
  • Use short mode status output for git and bzr.
  • Typo. Closes: #586233, #588913
Posted Sunday night, July 18th, 2010

mr 0.48 released with these changes

  • Fix the hours_since function built into mr's shell library to not exit, but return a true/false exit status. This allows it to be used outside of skip tests.
Posted late Friday afternoon, February 5th, 2010