a "patch tree" instead of a patch queue?

[Tom Widmer]

Dan wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm wondering how to do something with Mercurial (or other VC software)
> that is pretty rare, possibly nonexistent. :)
> 
> I'm a mathematician, and I have a paper that I'm working on. The paper
> is a LaTeX file, along with a number of other miscellaneous files (a
> BibTeX file, XFig figures, etc.) I have several things that I do with
> the paper, primarily: (1) submit it to a journal, and (2) put it on the
> arXiv (the preprint server at arxiv.org). 
> 
> What I'd like is a way of maintaining two changesets for those two
> things, both based on a "base" version of the paper. A Mercurial queue
> is not the right thing for this, because I want to maintain two
> different, mutually incompatible changesets to the same files.

> Is there an easy way to accomplish this, using Mercurial or other
> version control software?

Create your base branch.
Clone that into as two new branches, journal and arXiv.
Make the necessary fix ups in those two branches and commit them.
Make changes in base branch, commit, commit, etc.
When you're ready to publish, pull changes into from base into your two 
clones, and merge, making any new fix ups required.

You could also do this with named branches in a single repo, but I think 
that using mqueues complicates things.

Tom