mercurial for dummies (newbies), remote heads etc

[Uwe Brauer]

Hi 

I would like to ask for advice.

I do collaborate using mercurial but mostly with single users and that
works reasonable well, even given that the other person does not really
understand mercurial.

Now because of coronovirus I have forced with six colleagues to
collaborate and proposed mercurial.

Well two problems/question occur

    1. They did not take the time to learn the basic so they got
       confused when some pushes got refused, because of remote
       anonymous heads (I did not tell them the force option). I tried
       to explain the merge command but it did not really work out,
       maybe I should have told them about the fetch command, but if
       there is a conflicting merge, thinks can get worse.

       a. So I thought have having used named branches (one collaborator
          one branch), and I do the merge, but sooner or later similar
          problems occur.

    2. What would you guys have proposed?

    3. I wonder how git deals with this situation, you want to push, but
       there is already a commit (so in mercurial you would pull and
       merge) does git do this automatically?

Thanks 

Uwe Brauer