how can you tell you have merged?

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

Matt Mackall wrote:
> You're hardly the only one. It's quite common that people who've been
> using hg for a while come to us with a question that's answered by 'have
> you looked at hg parents?' and we hear back 'oh, that's awfully useful!'

I've been thinking about this one a while, partly while watching Mozilla 
people struggle through their first steps with Mozilla, and I think an 
important part of it is the basic concept of working dir parents.

You see, in SVN or bzr, the working directory parents will *always* be a 
tip-like revision. You cannot commit against any other revision there.

This is a pretty big difference, but not something that is very obvious 
to people first starting to use hg. So they run into this, when 
committing against a non-tip revision, or when merging, and they don't 
understand at first that the working dir has, in fact, a specified 
ancestor revision which is a force to be reckoned with.

So yes, some upfront documentation here might be helpful.

Cheers,

Dirkjan