Is there anything in mercurial to 'parameterise' values in a file?

[Marcin Kasperski]

Steve Fink <sphink at gmail.com> writes:

> I also see a 'keyword' extension that might do what you want.
>
> `hg help keyword`

No, it won't. Whatever you want. Seriously. I tried using keyword a few
times and absolutely always it was major PITA. Unexpected conflicts,
unexpected merges, unexpected update failures, accidental commits
of expanded values, accidental distribution of unexpanded…

Note: I am of course biased, because I finally developed alternative
solution¹ to the specific problem of version-number/cvs-like-keywords/…
But it was preceded by intensive and painful attempts to use keyword.

¹ https://pypi.org/project/mercurial_update_version/