Questions about branching in Mercurial

[Tim Allen]

On Sat, May 05, 2007 at 02:25:43PM -0500, Mark A. Flacy wrote:
> On 2007.05.05 09:40, Tim Allen wrote:
> > Because of various bad experiences with CVS and developers messing
> > around with repositories on the server, I've been avoiding version
> > control systems whose solution to centrally-stored branches is
> > 'developers should ssh to the server and clone off a new branch there'.
> > Hence, I've been concentrating on Mercurial's "named branches" which it
> > seems can be administered nicely with "hg push" and "hg pull".
> > Unfortunately, named branches aren't documented very well in "hg help",
> > and the wiki page isn't much better.
> 
> Why do you think that named branches are a better solution than
> a cloned repository? 

I'll admit I don't have an iron-clad religious conviction about it, but
a number of smaller reasons add up to this overall preference:

    - That's how CVS does it, so it's less of a mental leap to use a new
      VCS that operates on the same model.
    - I'm greatly attached to the idea of cloning a repository and
      having every bit of the project's history right at my fingertips,
      directly examinable via my VCS tool.
    - If the VCS tool handles branches, our internal documentation for
      branching will probably look something like 'branch && push',
      which is very hard to get wrong.
    - If the VCS tool does not handle branches, our internal
      documentation will involve sshing to the server, finding the
      correct repository, cloning it to the correct name in the correct
      location, and recording the existence of the branch in some
      documentation somewhere. Everything done manually is a thing that
      can be done wrong.