branch and revision together

[Greg Ward]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Martin Geisler <mg at lazybytes.net> wrote:
> Greg Ward <greg-hg at gerg.ca> writes:
>> But using a named branch for every little feature or fix is probably a
>> Mercurial anti-pattern.
>
> I'm wondering if that is still true now that we can close branches in
> order to remove them from the 'hg branches' and 'hg heads' lists?

Hmmmm.  Maaaybe.  I have not tried working that way myself, so I do
not consider myself qualified to comment.  Perhaps someone who *has*
tried that sort of workflow should speak up.

My gut instinct still says that because named branches are immutable,
it's best to create them conservatively.  If you want git-style topic
branches, use bookmarks or different repos.  But personally I don't
see much need for any of those things... plain old Mercurial plus MQ
does pretty much everything I want.  I only use named branches in two
contexts:

  * in our main repository at work (30-ish developers, 9 years of history,
    110k changesets): we create 2-3 release branches per year, and we use named
    branches for that
  * we also have a separate Mercurial repo for each 3rd-party project
that we use
    with local modifications.  Upstream releases are committed on
default, and local
    changes live on a local named branch.

Greg