Branching options

• Steve Losh's "4 ways to branch in Mercurial"
  • official wiki: 1) push/pull/clone 2) bookmarks 3) named branches 4) anonymous/implicit branches
  • Seriously?? "branches add too much information! waaaa!"
• what a "head" means
• chapter 4 of the Hg book: "A tour of Mercurial: merging work"
• Mercurial branching, main and stable, a possible workflow
• "Mercurial itself encourages named branches for long-running branches, but discourages their use for feature branches. It's a social, not technical, reason."
  "Over the last year or so, the Mercurial team has made a HUGE number of improvements to named branches. ... Working with named branches now generally does not cause any problems."
• "The flaw is that it's quite easy to have more than one branch with the same name, and it's difficult to tell when this has happened."
• "For the concept described in the Git literature with the word branch and in the Mercurial literature with the word head, I shall use the word lineage. I shall use the word family when referring to the concept the Mercurial literature uses branch to describe, which is a name that distinguishes a related set of lineages."
  • some attempts to clarify exactly what "lineage" and "family" mean: [1] [2]

• named branches versus multiple repos
  • OH GOD, my head hurts
• example of using Hg for submitting a patch to a read-only SVN repo (see especially "A Patch On A Patch")

Branching policy

• official wiki
• chapter 8 of the Hg book: "Managing releases and branchy development"