Why are tags in commits

[Angel Ezquerra]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 8:51 PM, Jensen, Aaron <ajensen at webmd.net> wrote:
>> Better yet, it would be really cool if mercurial had a built-in tag merge tool or algorithm...
>
> Why merge .hgtags at all?  If the sum of all tags is the state of the .hgtags at the head of each branch, does it really need to be merged across branches?
>
> We have a daily build of our software, on a release branch and default, on different servers  Each successful build gets tagged.  This caused a frequent conflict/resolve cycle for the next person that merged release into default.  Sometimes this was a couple weeks worth of tags.  Even with a good merge tool, resolving those conflicts was complicated.  To resolve the issue, we created a merge-patterns rule that always takes the local copy of .hgtags:
>
>      [merge-patterns]
>      .hgtags = internal:local
>
> Now, nobody ever has to merge .hgtags.
>
>      <:> Aaron
>

I don't understand how that solves the problem. Aren't you losing
whichever tags were defined on the merged branch?

Cheers,

Angel