Mercurial Workflow: Feature seperation via named branches

[Kevin Bullock]

On 14 Jun 2011, at 11:47 AM, Judson Wilson wrote:

> 
>> The reason that note is there is that the #1 question we get about named
>> branches by a wide margin is:
>> 
>> "I made a temporary branch, how do I get rid of it?"
>> 
>> The permanence of named branches is NOT an implementation detail, it's
>> bedrock design. Thus, telling people not to create them willy-nilly is
>> solid advice.
> 
> Curious if there is a more lightweight way to do this. Perhaps some kind of layer on top of a repo that could allow you to put min-branches on top, and then we could just deprecate the older model (or save it for real divergences in the trunk, such as a fork between a new major-version).

As Matt said, we have this: bookmarks. But named branches will never be deprecated in favor of bookmarks, for two reasons: hg's backward compatibility guarantees, and the fact that named branches solve a different problem, and do it quite effectively.

> I personally would like to name feature branches in a visible manner when looking through the tree, but not to show up on a list of "mainline branches".  I know this can be accomplished using commit messages, but that can be cumbersome.


Bookmarks are for exactly this, and as of 1.7 they're no longer an extension.

pacem in terris / mir / shanti / salaam / heiwa
Kevin R. Bullock