Why you don't want to allow disabling "branches are global and permanent, did you want a bookmark"?

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 2012-08-09 21:57, Augie Fackler wrote:
> Yes, there is: the (hypothetical git) user will get angry that the
> branch is permanent, and decide Mercurial is a useless piece of trash
> and never look back.

I think you still haven't delivered any convincing argument why we
should care about such angry stubborn users B at the expense of annoying
current users A.

Also, I note again that B are users who obviously have refused to read
anything about Mercurial branches (specifically, they obviously applied
a command before having read 'hg help branch') and who seem to think
they can blindly apply concept X named Y from git on Mercurial.

What's more, your "shoot in the foot" argument is a complete red
herring. If you start using a tool that's supposed to store your data
but you refuse to read anything before using it, then you have clearly
done something wrong. Blame yourself.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are more concepts from git, which can't
be blindly applied to Mercurial without causing havoc. Do we now have to
study git and warn on a pile of other command usages as well? For
example, do we now have to warn that 'hg pull' is not going to do a
merge as git's pull does? No.

Mercurial is not git. It's as simple as that.

Trying to start making Mercurial look like git is a dead end (IMHO).
Even if it's only by assuming that someone who executed "hg branch" most
likely made an error (and telling them "hey, you most likely wanted
'bookmarks'!").