Bookmarks usage survey

[Angel Ezquerra]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 2:39 AM, Stephen Lee <sphen.lee at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I would like to get a feel for how many people are using bookmarks,
> and how they use them.
>
> 1) Do you use bookmarks? How do you use them/what does your workflow look like?
>
> 2) Are they working well for you? Any pain points?
>
> 3) If you don't use them, is there something preventing you? What do
> you use for feature branches instead?
>
> I would really like to hear from some of the bigger players (Facebook, Mozilla).
>
> Thanks,
> Steve

Hi,

I personally don't use them much. Most of the time I use regular
branches. The main reason is that branches work just fine! I find that
branches are conceptually simple and easy to use. They have their
drawbacks (e.g. that you cannot rename them after the fact or that to
close them you must create a new commit which sometimes creates a
loooong line in the DAG if you happen to close an old branch).

On the other hand bookmarks feel a bit complicated. The main thing
they have going for them is that you can easily get rid of them (which
means that you can also rename them) and that they are familiar to git
users. Other than that I think they have a few drawbacks compared to
regular branches:

- It's not super clear (to me!) how bookmark divergences are handled
(this is probably just my ignorance, though)
- I don't like that there is no recorded history of how bookmarks have moved
- They seem more complicated (to me) than branches (perhaps because I
don't use them). For example, how do you know what revisions belong to
a "bookmark branch" (if we can call them that)? I am currently trying
to add bookmarks to the TortoiseHg branch combobox and we've had a
discussion on which revisions we should show when a bookmark is
selected. For now it seems we have settled into just showing _all_
ancestors of the bookmark because there is no way to tell where the
"bookmark branch" starts (an alternative was to show the ancestors up
to the most recent branch point, but that is somewhat arbitrary).

I think that some of the (perceived?) drawbacks of regular branches
could be fixed, reducing the need of using bookmarks. For example I
have sometimes thought that there could be an extension that let you
add an .hgbranches file that let you record branch renames (and
behaved a bit like .hgtags) by using a revset.

That being said I do use them a bit as a way to create "subbranches"
by naming multiple heads on the same branch (at work we have one repo
that pulls from two separate repos and thus has two heads on default
:-/ ).

Anyway, I'm happy that we have something similar to the git branch
mechanism, to make git refugees happy.

Cheers,

Angel