Rather basic question about using mercurial in test/production set-up

[Chris Green]

I use mercurial simply for managing my own (feeble?) coding efforts,
configuration files, etc.

Until now I've not needed to separate code I'm testing from what might
be called 'production' code as buggy code wouldn't lose data or affect
anyone else.  I just keep testing until the program is bug-free[ish]
and then it's 'production'.  I.e. my ~/bin directory is in my
mercurial repository, I check the file out, change it, run it, test it
until I'm happy with the changes then check it back in.


However I now have a situation where I do need to keep the testing
code separate from production as it were.  It's my mail filter program
which handles all my incoming mail.  Thus I can't just change it and
have errors in it because I will lose mail.

I have implemented a 'test site' on a different system but that system
doesn't have mercurial on it and I only have a user ssh login account.
I have my domain hosting provider send all my mail both to my home
system where I 'really' read mail and to the test site so that on the
test site I can run the same mail filtering as at home and it doesn't
matter if I break it.

So how can I manage this?  I need to check files out from a repository
(which will be on a system on my home LAN) and copy them out to the
test site.  Then, after modifying and testing, I need to copy the files
back to the home mercurial repository, check them in and get them into
their working directories.

I'm sure there must be pretty standard sequences for doing this, it's
such a basic requirement, but up until now I haven't really needed to
do it.  Are there any tutorials for this sort of work sequence?

-- 
Chris Green