How to merge the display of logs from several Mercurial repositories

Question

Is there a way to merge the change logs from several different Mercurial repositories? By "merge" here I just mean integrate into a single display; this is nothing to do with merging in the source control sense.

In other words, I want to run hg log on several different repositories at once. The entries should be sorted by date regardless of which repository they're from, but be limited to the last n days (configurable), and should include entries from all branches of all the repositories. It would also be nice to filter by author and do this in a graphical client like TortoiseHg. Does anyone know of an existing tool or script that would do this? Or, failing that, a good way to access the log entries programmically? (Mercurial is written in Python, which would be ideal, but I can't find any information on a simple API for this.)

Background: We are gradually beginning to transition from SVN to Mercurial. The old repository was not just monolithic in the sense of one server, but also in the sense that there was one huge repository for all projects (albeit with a sensible directory structure). Our new Mercurial repositories are more focused! In general, this works much better, but we miss one useful feature from SVN: being able to use svn log at the root of the repository to see everything we have been working on recently. It's very useful for filling in timesheets, giving yourself a sense of purpose, etc.

Answer 1

I figured out a way of doing this myself. In short, I merge all the revisions into one mega-repo, and I can then look at this in TortoiseHG. Of course, it's a total mess, but it's good enough to get a summary of what happened recently.

I do this in three steps:

1. (Optional) Run hg convert on each source repository using the branchmap feature to rename each branch from original to reponame/original. This makes it easier later to identify which revision came from which source repository. (More faithful to SVN would be to use the filemap feature instead.)
2. On a new repository, run hg pull -f to force-pull from the individual repositories into a one big one. This gets all the revisions in one place, but they show up in the wrong order.
3. Use the method described in this answer to create yet another repository that contains all the changes from the one created in step 2 but sorted into the right order. (Actually I use a slight variant: I get the hashes and compare against the hashes in the destination, check that the destination has a prefix of the source's, and only copy the new ones across.)

This is all done from a Python script, but although Mercurial is written in Python I just use the command line interface using the subprocess module. Running through the three steps only copies the new revisions without rebuilding everything from scratch, unless you add a new repo.