"named branches" vs "bookmarks" FUD

[anatoly techtonik]

On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 7:04 PM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-01-03 at 18:33 +0300, anatoly techtonik wrote:
>> I feel fear when touching named branches in Mercurial.
>> I tried to track it down:
>>
>>
>>  "Many people don’t like cluttering up changeset metadata with branch
>> names, especially if they’re small branches that are going to be
>> merged pretty quickly."
>> http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/#branching-with-named-branches
>>
>> fear 1. cluttering changeset metadata
>>
>>
>> $ hg branch versions
>> marked working directory as branch versions
>> (branches are permanent and global, did you want a bookmark?)
>>
>>
>> fear 2. warning
>> uncertainty 1. permanent and global are bad
>>
>> "it is almost never a good idea to use this facility for short-term
>> branching, since branches created this way are inherently “eternal”"
>> http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/BranchingExplained
>> pointed by
>> http://bryan-murdock.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-is-so-wrong-with-mercurials-named.html
>>
>> fear 3. named branches are inherently "eternal"
>> fear 4. inherently "eternal" is evil
>> uncertainty 2. named branches are bad for short-term branching
>>
>>
>> So, looking at all these sources of *semi-official* FUD, I wonder -
>> are there some inherent problems with Mercurial internals that affect
>> performance or other aspects that make Mercurial developers impose
>> specific workflow (avoid short-term named branched) on its users?
>>
>> Otherwise I don't see why people should be discouraged of using them.
>> Tagging series of changesets with meaningful names makes project history
>> better, not worse.
>
> Here's the short version:
>
> - we introduced a named branch feature very similar to the feature
> present historically in every other SCM except Git
> - many people tried to use it like the completely different history-less
> feature with the same name in Git based on blindly copying Git howtos
> - these people who had clearly never read the named branch docs or ever
> used any SCM other than Git complained when they couldn't get rid of the
> branches they created
> - such people showed up to complain on a daily basis for a couple years
> - we eventually got sick of their whining
> - we put in warnings
> - they've mostly shut up (woo!)
>
> We have users with thousands of named branches in production and have
> done tests on up to 10k branches and the performance impact is fairly
> minimal.
>
> The warnings are there for gitwits, if you have reading comprehension
> skills, please proceed.

I am not comfortable that other people still recommend to stay away from
Mercurial named branches without ability to explain why. I am also not
an authority to convince them, even though you message helps.

Still, why not just say "those, who started from Git should use bookmarks,
everybody else may proceed"?