How to exclude files from merging

[Doug Philips]

On Monday, November 10, 2008, at 03:02PM, "Matt Mackall" <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
>Mercurial is a distributed system. This means that, unlike centralized
>systems, there is no concept of authority. Every user is in absolute
>charge of their own repository. I can't tell you what you can and cannot
>check into your repository - it's impossible in principle, it's
>potentially dangerous and futile in practice. Thus, Mercurial doesn't
>even consider the idea.

While simplistic and extreme, that stance is... sub-optimal.
Given that "in repository" branches are not fully supported,
the prevailing/suggested work flow is to make local clones
for features, experiments, etc. Even if "in repository" branches
were supported, it is often necessary to make local clones
in order to actually test/run parallel lines of development in parallel.
Sadly, making local clones is more painful to put into practice
than it should have to be since most, but not all, of the
repo's .hgrc file has to be copied, paths "fixed up", etc.

The question is not: "How to make Mercurial like a Centralized system?"

The question is: "How to make natural Mercurial workflows convenient
enough to use so that the tedium of doing so does not interfere with the real
task(s) at hand.."

--Doug