Re: coming from git, understanding mercurial branching

From: Tim Chase <git@tim.thechases.com>
Date: Sep 6, 2013, 19:29 UTC
Message-ID: <20130906142927.279a994a@bigbox.christie.dr>
In-Reply-To: <20130906175124.7d08947410503681449642ad@domain007.com>

On 2013-09-06 17:51, Konstantin Khomoutov wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I found this guide [1] very useful back in the time I tried to grok
> Mercurial.
> 
> 1.
> http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/

Indeed, after reading it, that's the most sense I've been able to make of Mercurial's strange branching. I guess it boils down to the following rough heuristic:

- if you want to dink around locally, but don't want to publish your
  branches (yet), default to bookmarks using "hg bookmark"

- once you want a branch to be public, consider making a "real"
  branch using "hg branch"

- if you want complete isolation in case you screw up something like
  merging, use a clone

I still prefer Git's way, but at least I'm not left scratching my head when I have to play with Mercurial branches.

Thanks, all.

-tkc