In my project, I haven't been using hg remove, hg mv or hg addremove due to ignorance. Consequently, every time I've renamed or moved a file, the history of that file has been messed up and now when I look at an individual file's history, I will only see a portion of the history.
What I'm looking for is a way to go back and retroactively fix all of those renaming mistakes so that the file history will stay together. What I imagine would be most likely is a way to edit the data in ".hg\store\data" to make this work. I've been experimenting, and I see the lines copy: and copyrev: in the data for the files I've renamed, so I suspect that has something to do with it.
Assume that I have control of the central repository and that there are no clones of it currently.
Summary:
Since you have full control of the repo this can be 100% fixed using normal hg commands.
The principle idea is to insert new changesets in the right places which effectively correct the original ones.
Let's say your history looks like this:
A-B-C-*
(* is your working folder)
and it was in B that you renamed a file in the filesystem without renaming it in hg.
Do this:
hg up A
hg revert -r B --all
hg mv oldfilename newfilename
hg commit -m <message>
The key here is using revert which is used to copy changes from a changeset into your working folder. This only works this way because you have updated to the predecessor of the changeset you are reverting.
at this point your history looks like:
A-B-C
\
B'-*
where B' is the "corrected" variant of B. Continue with:
hg rebase -s C -d B'
and you have:
A-B
\
B'-C-*
You can now clean up by doing:
hg strip B
leaving just:
A-B'-C-*
Of course where I used revisions like B you need to type the actual revision # or hash.
You could also use TortoiseHG or some other GUI to do a lot of these steps.