Mercurial Branching

[paul_nathan at selinc.com]

User branches are something we've used to isolate changes in a possibly 
broken state on the server. We far prefer this than the alternative of 
having changes vanish due to some kind of failure.

- - -
Regards,
Paul Nathan
x1770



From:   Greg Ward <greg at gerg.ca>
To:     "A. S. Budden" <abudden at gmail.com>
Cc:     mercurial <mercurial at selenic.com>
Date:   02/24/2012 07:15 PM
Subject:        Re: Mercurial Branching
Sent by:        mercurial-bounces at selenic.com



On 24 February 2012, A. S. Budden said:
> Moving to Mercurial and a properly distributed way of working, I expect
> that we won't bother with the user branches (as each will effectively be
> working on a separate branch by having a local clone on their hard
> disk). (Comments?)

I don't see much point in user branches. The whole point of DVCS is
that everything is private and local until you explicitly decide to
share it with the world. If multiple people are working together on a
feature, they should have a feature branch or work directly in
default.

> I had been thinking that we'd probably use 'bookmarks' for feature
> branches as they are relatively short-lived.  Do you think this is a
> good idea?  There's a risk that (if commit messages are poor) the
> feature branches may get lost in the 'noise' of the history.  Also they
> are private to developers so if two developers ever work together on a
> feature, they have to bookmark it independently.  I know Mercurial 
allows
> bookmark pushing, but (a) it's not automatic, so most people probably
> won't do it and (b) I can't see how to do it in TortoiseHG, so most
> people in my GUI-obsessed department can't do it.
> 
> I've also been reading Greg Ward's recent emails on the mailing list and
> they've scared me somewhat with regards to bookmarks.

Oh god not that guy again. Won't someone shut him up? ;-)

Anyways, I strongly encourage you to spend some time playing around
with bookmarks. I'd like to hear if I missed something really obvious.
Or I'd like someone to back me up.

FWIW, we've just started our first crack at named branches for
development branches. (We've been using them for release branches
since we switched to Mercurial, ie. Jan 2010). It's a bit of work for
me because I've got a couple of hooks in place to make sure people
don't create bad branches or do bad merges, so I need to update those
hooks without losing the goodness they offer. But we are not using
bookmarks right now.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward                                http://www.gerg.ca/
Pointers are Arrays; Code is Data; Time is Money
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